TPE 1

TPE 1.1

Instructs students with disabilities in the core academic curriculum at the grade levels and in the service delivery modes of legal assignment.

Instructing students with disabilities in the core academic curriculum at the grade level is extremely important and I understand that all students learn differently. I have learned that many students can easily listen to a whole class lesson and work independently on their own, however, many students with disabilities in my class benefit more from small group or one on one instruction. In my classroom, all students are learning the same content, but they are learning in different ways. I have done my best to make learning interactive and fun, especially for students with disabilities as hands-on learning has shown to be more effective. For example, I created a hands-on lesson regarding the different parts of the pumpkin. Students learned about the different parts of a pumpkin and what each part was used for. During this lesson, students had the opportunity to touch a real pumpkin. This lesson could have been taught in a much simpler way, however, I believed this lesson was most beneficial for all students. One of my students with an IEP has a diagnosis of Autism and tends to get distracted easily during lessons and can become disengaged. Typically, this student can only focus for a few minutes before losing interest and needing to get up and move around the room. This student also tends to distract other students once they lost interest in the lesson. This particular student is most engaged during lessons if it is something of their interests or very sensory and hands-on. This student has multiple fidget toys available to use any time throughout the day. However, sometimes, the fidget toys are not enough. This lesson was aimed towards supporting this student and engaging them in the content. During the lesson, this student was very interested in the material and was extremely excited to start touching the parts of the pumpkin after seeing the pumpkins in the front of the classroom and seeing the bowls of pumpkin parts. Before the lesson began, the student was already eager to get started. The engaging hands-on learning helped this student follow along and meet the learning objective by the end of the lesson.

TPE 1.2

1.2 - Delivers comprehensive systematic instruction.

In a class of 30 students, 2 with IEPs, it is essential that I deliver comprehensive systematic instruction. It was important for me to get to know my students and understand their needs. My two students who do have IEPs are both visual learners, which is why we started to use a visual schedule for each day as pictured below. Every day there is a schedule up on the board that shows what we will be working on. This allows students to visually see their day and what comes next.

With this class I also used the Cover, Copy, Compare strategy to help students with their letter recognition. This strategy requires comprehensive systematic instruction as students are unfamiliar with this process. The project is attached to the right, along with student samples.