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Special Education Teachers – Creating a Good Lesson Plan For Your Students
Among the thousands of teachers in America, one particular group in this profession deserves to be recognized more than the others – they are the special education teachers. They are a group of specialized teachers who work with students of special needs that not every teacher is able to teach. If you are one of these teachers this article is to help you create a lesson plan for your students.
If you are a special education teacher you are probably having trouble creating a lesson plan for your students. A special education lesson plan is an educational technique or teaching method that is made specifically for students of any age group that have some disabilities.
Now, the lesson plans do vary depending on the student’s disability, its extremeness and the student’s age. The main goal of the lesson plans are to prepare the students to function on their own, to master certain minimum skills to help them, and to help them build and support social competencies. All of these things are important but the number one importance of a special education lesson plan is to help the student and their family to lead normal and problem free lives.
Some of the topics a special education lesson plan covers are math, language, arts, science, music, computer and internet lessons, P.E., social studies, health, etc. The plans cover pretty much every subject that those in a regular class are learning but the material is changed to suit the students.
The best subject for those with a disability is music, dance, and any other art form. These subjects help students with disabilities to relate to the lessons which directly enhance their learning process. Also, reading, writing and any public speaking should be encouraged by the special education teacher as it will help the students in the long run.
As long as you have a well thought out lesson plan you will be able to enhance the student’s feelings and responses, the student’s reasoning ability and reading skills, create a sense of fulfillment in the student, promote the student to communicate, help the student to achieve motor control and physical wellness, etc. Hence, it is most important for any special education teacher to thoroughly plan out a well thought lesson plan as this will enable and enhance the learning process of these special students.
If you have no idea on how to create a good lesson plan, you can get some references and information on the internet, in books, and in articles. Do not just take the lesson plan and use it but modify it to suit the individual student.
Being a special education teacher is one of the hardest things you could do but is also one of the most fulfilling. With a good special education lesson plan you are able to accomplish so much in making the student’s life the best it can be.
Tags: Books, Disabilities, E Learning, Education, Education Teacher, Educational, Idea, Learning, Lesson Plans, Math, Special, Special Education, Special Education Teacher, Special Education Teachers, Special Needs, Special Students, Student, Studies, Teach, Teacher, Teachers, TeachingRelated posts
Mathematics is the Science of Patterns
Science has been a way of Man interpreting his environment and making an acceptable law that those who were interested to look in to these things could follow on and add their own experience. Art on the other hand has always been seen as Man’s way expressing himself abstractly without any particle constraints and is often deemed as the opposite of Science. But I have come to see the effects of both being felt on the other. This is so based on the fact that I am an intellectual that has been deeply rooted in the Sciences but yet I am also a man who loves to express himself in deep thought or discourse, poem, song or otherwise. To go one step further, my area of expertise and physical gifting is both in the area of Mathematics. As much as I have been gifted and have succeeded academically in Mathematics, my love and fascination has always been on one of the most intriguing tools Man has been able to fashion, The Computer. I have always seen this tool as the perfect marriage between Science and Art! It allows the most complex patterns to be printed on fabric and other materials that ordinarily would be unthinkable to do so, such as glass and plastic. Not only does this tool allow such complex replication such as printing which is not Art (the artist may say) but they are having the ability to analyze the same replicated patterns not only with respect to how they are seen (the most used form of conscious human perception) but other factors that human perception could never fathom conscious or unconscious. It is also no strange coincidence that the Computer is based on the fundamentals of Mathematics. It is worthwhile to go into some detail about how Mathematics the fundamental element in Computer Science, that which motivated the Computer allowed us to encapsulate from the very basic to incomprehensibly complex.
The very structure of Mathematics is based on patterns formed in and around Man’s own existence. Mathematics is its earliest forms is equivalent to Logic and Reasoning and the concept of quantity is not the obvious, but is the only way that Man has been able to make a strong case for Logical Statements and Reasons why things are the way they are. Strange is it? But it is true the concept of Numbers has opened the senses of Man to interpret, predict, encapsulate, simulate and demonstrate almost all forms of Nature. Art on the other hand is by no means inferior, since the natural expression that comes from Artistic sculpting, painting, writing, dreaming and imagination can never be reproduced or encapsulated by Science and specifically the Science of Numbers. It gives us a timely reminder that Man is definitely unique and lord of his domain as far as his environment is concerned. And yet with the advances of the Pattern Finding Tool he can come really close to doing so.
Computer Science is linked to Mathematics through basic pattern of counting. This system that has help the computer conquer some of the most complicated phenomenon such sounds, artistic printed designs and evolved to include animations (a mass improvement to Technicolor give what we know as Computer Generated Images), receiving these sounds, pictures (advanced scanning and machine reading in character recognition or machine sight), texture to in detail analyzing movement and position. The use of the basic “Black and White” Binary Number Pattern is the crux of the whole matter that allows us to see color of our computer screen. Binary is also pattern that Man used to conquer Reasoning where the 1 and 0 became equated with “True” or “False”. Computer Science is based on the whole Mathematical Logic along with the advances in Silicon Chemistry and other semiconductor designs extend that functionality to include millions, billions and even Trillions of Bits of information to be considered thus enhancing the picture so to speak. The advances in Nuclear Technologies have been interestingly merged with the Computer’s Analytical Reasoning capabilities to produce very precise Actuators and Sensors in the discipline of Robotics and Automated Theory. All this analysis, accuracy and acceleration seen in a computer system is basically attributed to the Binary Number Pattern platform. We take each number of this system to recognize one of two states: “On” or “Off”. And from this rationale, we got basic components of computing called switches. Electronics also took a path of its own to further tame electricity with the use of relays. However the ultimate training of the natural phenomenon of flowing electrons came which the discovery of the Transistor. This has since then gave over the Silicon Age and we have much fast and more capable machines being able of processing Trillions of pieces of information of one particular subject.
But my appreciation of Mathematics as in the form of Computer Science Advances is not based on the academic success that I have had but on that of my own physical limitations. What fascinates me most and I hope I have also drawn your attention to it as well, is how remarkably well our own brains work on this concept of Black or White. I believe that what Man has only been able to do quite recently with the computer has been hard-wired into humans from the beginning. Being male, not that personally feel there is any correlation, I have some difficulty distinguishing, remembering and naming colors. Contrastingly so, I am gifted with most immaculate photographic memory! I can recall strings of numbers, from phone numbers, ATM PINs, ID numbers to just random numbers I see I can recall them. I can do the same with words, positional directions (eg. if I go on a bus ride, I would be able to drive back the way we came in the bus without using the map and from only being on the route one time) and colors believe it or not. I recognized my deficiencies as motivation to prove how well our brains work and at the same time show how impossible it would be to mimic even though based on the same basics we use in Mathematics and Computer Science.
Color is a fascinating concept that has meaning to us only because of the receptacles of the eyes and the processing power of our brains. Without our eyes and brains we have no idea how this world would look. Our eyes are the sensors of our bodies and our brains the computer. We know from science that white light reflects differently and is refracted when passing back through certain molecules of matter however the many different spectrums of light that can be seen can be encapsulated by the theory of Black and White. I love to always relate this classical experience I had (several times might I add), that motivated me to prove this using Machine Sight specifically identify certain colors. The first time I realized this phenomenon I was at a conference where two of my colleagues whose specialization was in Computerized Learning tested my ability to observe color changes. It was the then Windows Vista logo of the flag in the screen saver. When they asked me what color is square of the flag had I honestly could not see any differences between any of the frames. But when they started to point out each color was different the color seemingly looked dissimilar. I recognized then that my problem was not observing color but distinguishing it. To my eye color is not as fancy as many artistic types may make it with all the several naming schemes like light, dark, off, etc., etc. not to mention special names that mean the same thing like purple and violet. But these naming schemes are useful for Machine Learning of colors, but confuse the appreciation of colors in reality. When I look at a color I tend to classify it based on the Black or White Principle or as one would say a Light Color or a Dark Color and that is it! If someone asks me what color it is unless it is from the basic set of White-Black+RBG and subsequent combinations that we are taught in elementary school and up: Yellow, Green, Brown; I say I do not know. If some gives me a ‘heads-up’ I remember. So I say am not color-blind just color-lazy. But aspect of Color-Laziness where one does not implement color sorting faculties other than the basic Binary of colors, to implement and improve on this laziness using Computer Storage and Processing Power. My second and all other noticeable experiences of motivation further brings me to another aspect I will use to implement Computer Color Awareness, that is off Relative Color. For instance, when asked to borrow a pen that had a blue casing, I automatically assumed that the pen was also a blue-inked pen, also I asked for a blue-inked pen, I wrote with the pen assuming it was blue. However looking further back in what I was writing I noticed that the ink changed color from when I started to write with the new pen. I was totally unaware that the pen indeed was a black-inked pen in a blue casing only until I compared it with previous writing. Still, my Color-Lazy brain still needed convincing and it was only when I compared both colors on the White Paper (we usually write on). You may ask what is so special about the White Paper comparison, I will say it is necessary for a color-lazy brain where even the simplest of colors are skimmed over, they can only compare colors when they have a base-background and they compare colors by focusing on the base either white or black or for less lazy brains a contrasting color. My postulation is a computer who only has its database is Color-Lazy when its subroutine for color recognition is not running. It has the ability to have the wavelengths of light to be sensed by its sensor but without analysis it has not comprehension of that color.
So my plan of implementation gives us hope to process this life of fancy assorted cashews to make sense of how we observe color. I plan to do the same for Texture awareness. How you say? Go Figure!
Mathematics is the Power being physically aware and reasoning by taking record of what is and what is not as far you can be aware with respect to sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.
I Taught Mathematics at University and College level for over 5 years. My interests are in Computer Technologies that merge Mathematics and Computer Science, viz. Systems Science, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. My areas of specialization are Object Oriented Programming, Statistics and Systems Science. Mathematical Pattern Recognition is also a natural ability that I possess. I spent also a brief time enrolled in a Master’s Program for Electrical and Computer Engineering with focus on Mathematical Modeling and Optimization of Analytical Transducers for the Oil and Gas Industry. My next project will include a Systems Science focus on Machine Sight. A pet programming project that is based on my photographic memory is to code a WordFinder Object that can solve all the possible word combinations: uses, phrases, colloquialisms, grammar structures and elements for different languages and disciplines based on missing and misplaced letters.
Tags: Character, College, E Learning, Elementary School, Idea, Learning, Math, School, Special, Training, UniversityRelated posts
Categories For Special Education – Which One Fits My Child
Have special education personnel stated that your child was ineligible for special education, because they do not fit into one of the 13 eligible categories? Does your child have Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) but you were told by school personnel that this does not fit into the 13 eligible categories? Has your child been diagnosed as emotionally disturbed and you believe the child has autism? This article will discuss how you can determine what category of classification that your child can receive special education services under. By knowing these categories you can advocate for the one that meets your child’s needs.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) states that every child with a disability must receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE). Also special education services to meet their unique needs. Labels or classifications do not determine, if a particular child is eligible for a particular special education service, though sometimes special education personnel act like it does.
Categories:
- Autism: If you suspect that your child has autism ask special education personnel to give him or her, a childhood autism rating scale (CARS). The scale is done by the parent answering 13 questions about their child, and a knowledgeable person giving a score to the scale. The higher the number the more chance that the child has autism. If the scale is positive take your child to a specialized Pediatrician that specializes in autism. Pervasive developmental disorder is on the Autism spectrum. Autism is one of the eligible categories for special education services. So a child with PDD is eligible for special education services under the category of autism.
- OHI: For a child to be eligible under this category usually requires some type of documentation from the child’s physician. Many children with ADD and ADHD receive special education services under this category.
- Mental Retardation: Determined by IQ score; a child’s IQ score under 75 is considered to be in the mental retardation range. Be careful if your child’s IQ is normal and decreases as they grow older, this is indicative of an inappropriate education, not necessarily mental retardation.
- Emotional Disturbance (ED): Many children with autism are being given an ED label-Why? Because in my opinion special education personnel are reluctant to give a child an autism label due to cost of special education services. For a child to truly be ED, they must have no other disability!
- Deafness: This is a total loss of hearing and usually requires physician documentation.
- Hearing Impairment: Not a total loss of hearing as above!
- Visual Impairment: Severe impairment not fixed by glasses or contacts.
- Deaf-Blindness: Total loss of hearing and total loss of sight.
- Specific Learning Disability (LD): Children with reading difficulty despite appropriate instruction, math difficulty despite appropriate instruction, dyslexia, visual processing disorder, sensory integration disorder (SID), auditory processing disorder, all qualify under LD.
- Multiple Disabilities. Must include another disability and also mental retardation.
- Orthopedic Impairment: A child with Cerebral Palsy would qualify under this category.
- Speech or Language Impairment. Includes delayed speech, communication disorder, language disorder such as dyslexia, receptive and expressive language disorder etc.
- Traumatic Brain Injury: Any injury to the brain either at birth or when the child was older.
By understanding the 13 categories and what is required for each one, you will be able to be an informed advocate for your child. Children who need special education services and do not get them may have their lives ruined forever!
Tags: Adhd, Appropriate Education, Autism, Children, Disabilities, Disabilities Education, Disabilities Education Act, Dyslexia, Education, Fape, Free Appropriate Public Education, Idea, Individuals With Disabilities Education, Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, Learning, Learning Disability, Math, Mental Retardation, Multiple Disabilities, Public Education, School, Special, Special Education, Special Education Services, Specific Learning DisabilityRelated posts