One of the biggest benefits to teaching in a special education classroom is having the flexibility to meet the students where they are at. Everything is specially designed to build upon their skills and make the content accessible. With that being said, this focus on individualization can make it a challenge to create common learning targets for all students.
I like to keep my overall classroom learning targets general, and my small group learning targets more specific. For example, as a class we may be focusing on fractions and my 3 small groups could have more targeted objectives ranging from identifying whole objects to adding fractions with like denominators.
Since my main classroom learning targets are general, I only have to swap them out once a week or once a month. I find this far more manageable than trying to update our big focus wall daily. The other time saving step that I take is pre-planning all of my weekly objectives. I create a scope and sequence each year with all of the "big ideas" that I plan to teach. I use this document to create my focus wall cards. You can read more about how set up my scope and sequence HERE.
I like to print off all of my focus wall cards over the summer and organize them in the order that I plan to teach the topics (this is where that scope and sequence comes in handy!). Since the cards are in order, it takes me less than 30 seconds to swap out the cards each week. You heard that right... less than 30 seconds a week!
For my focus wall I typically include a weekly essential question, letter of the week, math focus, and behavior focus. The letter and math cards are included in my Focus Wall Bundle, and I use the editable cards from the file to type out my essential question. These questions align to our district's general education reading curriculum.
I created the behavior cards to align to Autism Adventures' Behavior Basics program. The program is amazing and provides multiple levels of social stores and activities for 60 different behaviors and social skills. It is well worth the investment. If you are using the program and would like focus wall cards that align to each of the behaviors... you're in luck! Mellissa from Autism Adventures was kind enough to allow me to share the cards with you! You can pick up the exclusive download HERE.
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