With the beginning of a new school year, I look forward to sharing new multisensory science activities that embed other academic and communication areas with my students!

Our class already has opportunities to meet students from the general education classes at the beginning of the year. As we build on these initial relationships, we will be carrying out some of the Kenan lessons in an inclusive setting. I look forward to sharing the multimodal teaching ideas with the general education classes through these lessons.

As we begin each unit topic from the Extended Content Standards, I plan to create video snippets for the parents to watch through Edmodo. I hope to help the parents understand a little more about how we address academics and communication in the classroom. I would love to have them use some of those ideas through homework activities. They already complete reading homework assignments.  I would love to take the home/school relationship to a new level of skill building for the students. This will hopefully help with generalization of the skills concepts.

With having some new students in my class this year, it always take a little time to find the most effective individualized communication methods. The new multisensory adapted lessons will simplify the job of adapting activities for new students.  Some ideas may need to be tweaked a little as we go along.

I look forward to sharing the many rich, educationally relevant ideas through the upcoming year. I feel refreshed and ready to bring it to the next level!

Throughout my fellowship, I have been focusing on creating science lessons for students with severe disabilities and deaf/blindness.I also planned to create inclusive lessons for our students to use within general education classes. Recently through conversations with my mentors, I got to thinking about how I am creating my lessons. My focus had been on how to create them so that my students could participate mainly in activities within our classroom. From information I learned at NCCAT, there is more of a focus on students working cooperatively within their own groups for learning science concepts. When I really got into the creation of my lessons, I realized that my lesson plans are multisensory and would be appropriate for students of all ability levels. Through the incorporation of technology, manipulative and communication adaptations, the activities would allow students of all ability levels to participate in group experiments at different levels within the lesson.  Although my lessons will be geared towards students with disabilities, each lesson will have a component that will show how lessons could be used in the inclusive setting. The basic ideas and adaptations of all the lessons will make them appropriate for any setting to meet the needs of all students while embedding science, math and literacy within the lessons.

Each year, I invite all of the classes in our elementary school to meet our children within our classroom. It is very helpful for the students to see how much our activities are like what they do in their classrooms…and how our children are so much like them…just with adaptations. When I think back to some of the group games we played at NCCAT, I remember noticing group dynamics. Some people were more outgoing or outspoken within the group than others. All of the Kenan Fellows are leaders but when some feel more comfortable within certain situations, they were more apt to speak up to be leaders during certain games. This concept demonstrates how all students need the opportunity to see what it feels like to be a leader. When our students with disabilities are in group situations with general education students, those students have opportunities to be leaders and assist our students. In creating these types of lessons, I hope they can be used to allow all students to feel like active learners in the activities.