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Many teachers come encounter working with students with special needs and may need to make special changes to make sure all students receive the best possible education and reach their greatest potential. Disabled students often need differentiated instruction to accommodate their specific learning abilities. Here are some tips and strategies:
- Create short and concise activities as often as possible to make it simpler for learning disabled children.
- Provide children with concrete objects and events such as things they can see, hear, touch, and smell. This will reduce the difficulty of abstract concepts.
- Provide repeated progress checks to let learning disabled children know how well they are doing on a particular task or goal.
- Provide immediate feedback to allow children to quickly see the correlation between teaching and understanding.
- Provide a lot of specific praise on a particular task, make sure to directly link comments to the activity such as, “I like the way you organized the crayons in the box.”
- Provide oral instruction for children with reading disabilities. For example, present reading materials and tests in an oral way so the activity is not influenced by the lack of reading ability.
- Plan to repeat instructions and offer information in both verbal and written formats to help learning disabled children use as many as their sensory abilities as possible.
- Promote cooperative learning activities as much as possible. Ask students with varying abilities to work together on a certain task or toward a common goal and create an environment that facilitates a community of learners.
