Winnie White, a 1st-3rd grade teacher, shows how to adapt a science unit on animal classification for nonverbal students and those with fine motor challenges. She adds vocabulary to AAC devices, simplifies worksheets with matching and circling tasks, and walks through using the SnapType Pro 2 app so students can type answers on a Bluetooth keyboard instead of writing by hand.
Are you looking for ways to meet the needs of your students with fine motor impairment or who are non-speaking in your classroom? Let's talk a little bit about that today. My name is Winnie White, and I am teaching in a self-contained classroom for grades 1st through 3rd grade, and I do have students in my classroom with some complex bodies, and I've had to learn different ways to adapt the curriculum in order to meet their needs and so that they can find the content to be accessible to them. I'm going to show you an example of what I did just this week in my science unit. I'm currently utilizing the Autism Helper curriculum for science. I am at Level 2, and I am using the Unit Number 4 for animal classifications. So for this unit, um, to help my students who are non-speaking and also who have fine motor impairment, I made a couple adjustments so that they could also participate in the lessons. The first thing I did was to make sure all of these terms— mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and birds— were in their devices. I'm sure every school has their own policy for working with students with AAC devices. In my school, I am allowed to make the necessary changes to this to my students' AAC devices. I communicate with the speech therapist and with parents as well to make sure we're all on the same page and everything is acceptable. But I decided since we're doing animals and mammals, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and birds were not in their device, they did have the word birds and they did have the word fish in FAST. There's the word fish. But I wanted them all in the same category in order to be able to do this lesson. I normally do not repeat words, but for this instance, I felt like it would be more accessible for my student to be able to participate in the science lessons. So I went ahead and went to animals all the way down to the end. I created a folder for the word with classifications, and inside the classifications, I added mammals, mammal, I did it singular, reptile, fish, amphibian, and bird so that they would be able to go directly to this section and be able to answer questions throughout this unit from this one page. This is what the first worksheet looks like in Unit 4. My student with fine motor impairment is able to draw lines to match. We have been working on that for a good year and a half at this point, and even more. But the first section says you're going to match the animal to the classification. I read each one of the options. I used the anchor chart with the students, and I illustrated to them how to draw a line from— we talked about each animal, what its classification was, and showed them how to draw a line from the animal to the word. Over here on the right, all they have to do is circle the correct habitat for each animal. My student with fine motor impairment is able to circle, So we just went one at a time. Now the tricky part was right here, where they had to finish each sentence. I want to show you something that I've learned about how to help a child with fine motor impairment with a worksheet that has writing requirements. I just learned about this new app called SnapType Pro 2 just this past week, and it's pretty exciting for me because it definitely helped my student already. I first downloaded SnapType, which is the free version. You can do a few things with SnapType just to give it a try. But in one week, I already knew I wanted to purchase the app. So you go to the App Store and you can purchase it for about $50. It's called SnapType Pro 2. I'm going to click on it. And this is the— what it starts like. I'm going to click on New Document. And I'm going to click Camera. At this point, I'm going to take a picture just of the section that I want to utilize the typing for. So I'm going to type— I'm going to take a picture of this Finish Each Sentence section. Once I do that, I can crop it. There's a crop button. I want to bring it in to just show that one text box. It's pretty simple. Once I do that, I can hit Done and check it. That means I can now give it a name. I'm going to call it— let's see, give myself the— show the clip keyboard. Um, Science Level 2 Unit 4, page 1. Just so that I will know whose it is, I'm going to go ahead and give initials and add. So here it is, and when I'm ready for her to work on it, I just have to click it and it opens up just like this, ready to go. Be sure that you go to your settings and that you make sure your Bluetooth is attached. So I'm going to connect this keyboard. You could use the keyboard that actually comes with the iPad, but I prefer to use this. I feel like it's a, it's a better feel for the student. So I'm going to go back and I am going to walk her through how to use this page. All right, so as you can see, we can touch this blue dot right there and touch the sentence. A frog is in. Ah, now let's look over here. What is a frog, um, Cindy Kay? It's an amphibian. So let's see. Oh, before we go further, let's answer this question. A frog is in. And if we go into your devices all the way over to classification, go You're going to see that word amphibian. Amphibian. Very good. So let's go ahead and type that word amphibian. You're going to look to see how to spell amphibian. There it is. You're going to start with that A, then M, there's the P, H, Oh, right here. I, B, I, A, N. All right, can you read the sentence? Let's go to the blue dot, turn it blue, and touch the sentence. A frog is an amphibian. Awesome. This is another strategy I use when working with students with fine motor impairment. A lot of times I will give them a word bank where all they have to do is pick it up and glue it and put it on the paper. This makes for a quick lesson and puts the focus on the content rather than on the ability to write. This was just to show you a couple ways to help you make your content accessible to your students who may be non-speaking or who have fine motor impairment. I encourage you to check out our other videos showing AAC in action and also some tips and tricks for ways to make content accessible to all of your students.
