Help me give my students color coded magnet letters and individual white boards to practice word building, writing, and picture representation as a multi-sensory approach to phonics, spelling, and reading.
I am a special education teacher in a self-contained autistic classroom in a Title I school. 95% of the students in our school qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. There are lots challenges each school year meeting the needs of the students academically, socially, and emotionally.
My students, who fall all across the autism spectrum, and struggle with communication skills and academic achievement, still come to school, work hard, and do their best no matter what obstacles they face.
They have a desire to achieve their goals and we do everything we can in the classroom to help them get there!
My Project
I do, we do, you do! I can show my students all day how to do a task, but when I include them in the learning and allow them opportunities to do it independently, they understand it better and retain it longer. Manipulatives support student engagement and differentiation. They give students ownership over their learning and can provide a bridge between abstract and concrete.
My students need color coded magnet letters and individual white boards to practice word building, writing and picture representation as part of a multisensory approach to phonics, spelling, and reading.
Paper/pencil activities don’t go very far in my classroom, with learners who need multiple ways of learning. It has its place, but it’s not always the best way to learn. When students have an opportunity to manipulate the materials, it keeps them focused on the activity at hand. When building words, I can have them do so with just a marker, but if given a multisensory way of word building, they will remember them better. Multisensory simply means presenting all information to students via three sensory modalities: visual, auditory, and tactile. It will also create an opportunity for peer modeling. When we do other manipulative hands on activities, the students in the groups are watching their peers for assistance. It makes it less teacher directed and puts some of the teaching and learning in the hands of my students! They explain it to each other! That is a teacher’s dream!
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