Adapting my Teaching

I started out my teaching career in a mild to moderate self-contained classroom. Our district had purchased us the Unique Learning System and I had to muddle my way through it. There is a lot of content provided in the units each month, and I started to get the hang of it. Then, this past year, while I was on maternity leave no less, I was told that my position would be slightly changing. I would no longer be teaching the K-1 mild/moderate self-contained kids, but would be teaching the K-3 moderate to severe medically fragile children.

What. A. Change. I quickly realized that reading the books for the unit and expecting them to sit and listen was just not doing the trick. So as all good teachers do, I changed up my entire routine. Instead of having them sit and listen to stories and expecting them to soak all of that information in, I got to work providing two to three adapted books per unit. I honestly didn't know where to start! I ended up catching some videos from Little Miss Kim's class on instagram. She had some amazing adapted books and so I was inspired to get to work! So, I started by modifying some of the books from the Unique unit and then I started to get more comfortable with adapting books. I started to create some of my own supplements to go along with the units each month. I started finding books from different sources and adapting them. My students started responding to the books, interacting, engaging, touching them, looking at them, and I mean truly looking at them!

Now my students are engaging in adapted books that go along with the unit theme daily. It's a lot of work. It truly is, but my students are so engaged, and accurately responding to questions about the text that it is 100% worth it. As we read a book I add it into a rotation for their task work, having them work 1-1 with a paraprofessional reading the book and taking data on comprehension.

Here are some pictures of the Unique Learning System books that I have adapted: 

I use the communication boards as matching icons to the story. Right now my students are at the level of choosing from two picture choices. 

Here are the Reading A-Z books that I adapted and some Scholastic books I plan on using in our classroom: 

Here is a peek at the supplemental activities I created for this specific unit on weather: 

here is the link to my TPT shop for this product: Weather Adapted Book Pack. Head on over to my instagram account to see some quick videos on these books (@multiplymagnificentlearners) Multiply Magnificent Learners

Here are some other activities I plan to use to reinforce the unit concepts daily in our morning meeting: 

These resources are from the Unique Curriculum. We will use this to determine what type of clothes Joey will wear daily according to the weather in Ohio. 

These are pictures of the mini-posters I made for my adapted weather pack in my TPT store. We will refer to these daily to discuss what season we are in.