Let me start out by saying every classroom and school is different, and this is just one perspective on what works for my adult transition classroom. There are so many components to making schedules and lesson plans run as smooth as possible in a special education classroom. Please also keep in mind, your school or administration may require you to uphold a certain criteria or structure for your lesson plans and classroom.
What My Class Typically Looks Like
My classroom is considered a self-contained classroom, although my whole school is dedicated to moderate/severe special education. With that being said, my school may be able to provide different types of supports versus a self-contained classroom in a public school/general education setting. I teach adult transition ages 18-22. I typically have anywhere from 10-12 students & 4-8 staff (depending on how many students have a one-on-one aide) each year. My students display a wide range of academic levels, which makes it very hard to teach the same lesson to my whole class.
You can read more about how I handle managing different levels of IEP goals and data collection on a regular basis here. My classroom lessons are mainly focused on functional academics, life skills, and vocational skills. Most of my students receive a lot of services (Speech, APE, OT, PT…etc) and participate in ON and OFF campus jobs, so it is rare that I have all of my students participating in a classroom lesson at once. My students and staff are constantly in and out of the classroom all day/week.
Being an adult transition classroom, my students are constantly in and out of the classroom all day. On any given day, I typically do not have my whole class in the classroom attending to a lesson except for our morning routine. This makes it hard to reach all of my students with a particular lesson! With special education, repetition is pretty much necessary for all students to be successful in retaining what they’ve learned. I am able to (and should) repeat the same lesson several times throughout the year. I am able to do a rotation of lessons in order to reach all of my students and their learning levels!
Now I know some of you probably want to see my lesson plans, but I’m sorry I’m not going to share them with you today. The reason I am not going to share them is because I believe lesson plans should be shaped and molded to each of your students, and no one student or classroom is alike. Each of my students also has completely different IEP goals. What I AM going to share with you though, is how I organize and rotate my lessons, as well as the every day routines we have part of our day!
Morning Routine
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Mid Day
END OF DAY ROUTINE
CURRENT EVENTS WEBSITES: https://www.spedadulting.com//currentevents/
As I have mentioned earlier, just because this system works for me now, it might not necessarily work for me in the future, and it might not work for you. Assess the type of classroom you have and your students needs, and make adjustments from there. I do hope you are at least able to take a little something that you can utilize to make your life easier!
Here are some FREE scope and sequence plans to get you get organized and started!
Thanks for reading!
