When it comes to things related to the Common Core, the Exceptional Children’s world is a small step ahead as far as embedding all of the core subjects into adapted lessons. All of our lessons have to be adapted and embedded to help our students understand their connections to the world.

Through my fellowship, I will be addressing how students with severe disabilities and deaf/blindness can learn about science topics while addressing literacy, communication, math and functional skills.  Technology and manipulatives will be an integral part of the unit plans I will be creating.  Since each classroom and school is different, some classrooms for students with severe disabilities are primarily self-contained. Others incorporate the option for an inclusive setting within the general education classrooms.

I will develop materials and lessons for students to be involved in both types of settings. This will allow the information to be used by general and exceptional children’s teachers.  The unit lessons will also be shared through the NC DPI Exceptional Children’s portion of their website. Each unit lesson will have examples of how technology, literacy and manipulatives can be embedded to address the needs of low incidence learners with and without deaf/blindness. Some of these lessons will be videotaped to give examples of  teaching methods during the activities. I am excited about this opportunity to grow more as a teacher by incorporating a variety of teaching methods and technologies to help my students succeed to the best of their abilities.

I am very excited to work with Beth Edwards from NC DPI and Dr. Sandra Warren from East Carolina University (Go Pirates!!!) in creating these multimodal unit lessons. They both bring a wealth of knowledge to guide me in creating these lessons. I look forward to learning from their expertise!