Hello everyone, I'm a first year teacher and i'm teaching a life skills classroom. I have ages 14-22. Most students are in 12th grade or beyond while 2 are in 9th. They both need more academics to meet their goals and the upcoming standardized test that they will need to take this year. However, I'm stumped on what to do! Anyone have any suggestions on how I try to multi-task and teach these kiddos academics (very low level academics) while the older ones their functional skills? Did i mention my paras aren't overly helpful? I mentioned splitting into small groups so I can do 1:1 or 2:1 for the younger kids and these ladies looked at me like i had 5 heads. It's only the second week but since services haven't started yet and we don't have the go ahead to go into the community, I'm at a loss and so overwhelmed. It gets better being a first year teacher...right??
Are there any common basic skills that they all could benefit from practice with? If you can find some tasks that are simple then you could give them to the paras for "centers" and then take one student at a time for individual goal work. Since my students are pretty low, I have tons of matching and sorting activities, fine motor activities, social skills (playing games) etc.
If you have to show your paras how to run groups, do it. The whole point of having paras in special ed is so each student can have their needs met, and it's your job to coordinate and make that happen. They need to follow your instruction.
THanks for the help/suggestions! love the pinterest board, ill be sure to follow it! Luckily speech, OT, and APE are starting next week so that takes up different parts of my day. My paras threatened to leave because I have a student who is aggressive/new to our program. I honestly have had worse, but I think they want everything to be sunshine and rainbows and refused to be restraint trained..its very frustrating. According to the other teachers around me they're half the reason the other teacher resigned. Luckily one is less abrasive than the other so I can get my point across to her. I'm thinking centers is the way to go. Glad to see others believe it is too. When I was a para last year at my old school we used it for every subject and it worked well, especially since we were a split 6th and 7th grade class. I guess my paras will get trained &need to have their stick from their ass removed soon, or itll be a long year for them. I dont take crap from people lol. Im just sick of hearing "oh we don't do that....the kids cant do that...we havent done that before."
