Progress monitoring is a necessary part of being a Special Education Teacher. It is important to student growth, but it shouldn’t take a lot of time. For me, I save time by creating a progress monitoring tub full of all of the essentials for assessing my students.  Progress Monitoring Storage Let’s first start with the container. As teachers, we LOVE containers, tubs, and all things cute storage. I love this ice cube chest from Amazon. It is large enough to hold file folders, but it is still small enough to carry around easily.  Progress Monitoring for Specific Skills I have…

As a special education teacher, there are literally NEVER enough minutes in the school day. I do my best to make the most of the precious minutes that I have with my students, even if it’s only for 30 minutes!  For my reading groups, I typically have thirty minutes on my daily schedule. With transition time, I don’t always have a full thirty minutes. I split my time between spelling and reading. In the images and descriptions below, you’ll find a breakdown of the amount of time I spend each day on each area.  I introduce a new phoneme or…

I love to read. I’m also a total nerd when it comes to professional development and learning new things. I literally have bookshelves full of books. Some I’ve read. Others are on my “To Be Read” list.  I feel like there is always something to learn in special education: a new strategy, developing research, a mindset shift. We can never learn or know enough. I hope that you will take a minute to browse these books and see if any of these areas are a good fit for you to read this summer.  Pre-Referral Intervention Manual This book is literally…

In special education, our time is precious. Routines help to accomplish many tasks on a daily or weekly basis to ensure that our students are getting well rounded instruction. I use these routines to accomplish practice basic skills in my small reading groups. Blending Words I lay out different letter cards on the table. What cards I have laid out depend on what group I have. In my lowest level group we work on CVC words where we have a vowel in the middle and we work on creating real and nonsense words that imitate CVC words. We work on…

It’s almost that time! Depending on where you live, you will soon be seeing sales for school supplies. For us teachers seeing those school supplies can put us into two moods. First mood is give me all the school supplies I can get because who doesn’t love new school supplies? The another mood is summer is not over so do not even think about getting out those school supplies! I am one where I get excited about new school supplies and a new year!  As a special education teacher in a resource room, what school supplies do I need most?!…