My students are 1st-4th grade students in a Comprehensive Academic Unit within an urban, public school on the south side of Milwaukee.
My classroom is a self-contained learning environment for students with orthopedic and intellectual disabilities who require significant academic, behavioral, and functional support.
All of my students are nonverbal and many require hand-over-hand support. Seventy-nine percent of the students at my school are minorities and nearly 80% are economically disadvantaged. Despite incredible challenges, my students come to school each day, and it is my job to excite and foster their love of learning and their desire to improve their reading, math, writing, and functional skills.
My Project
My students really need tactile materials in order to enhance their learning. As I develop my lessons that are specifically designed for the individual needs of each student, I create a wish list of items that would help my kids to understand a concept better, such as the Magnetic Pizza Fractions. I know that fractions would be so much more relatable to them if they saw them in a familiar form--pizza, and also in a form that they can manipulate with their hands like a puzzle. I also have a student who really needs fidgets in order to sit and participate during class. The Pop Tubes and Pin Art Toy are items that he loves, but over time have been broken from extensive use and now need to be replaced. Similarly, I am hoping that the word building blocks will be an excellent resource during our daily sight word activities as a way to build and see sight words in a more tactile form. My students love to build with blocks, and so I thought this would be a very high-interest activity for them.
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