My FAVORITE Special Education Curriculum

When I was a new special education teacher, I struggled with finding a curriculum that fit best for the diverse needs and different levels of my students. That was until I found The Autism Helper's Level Daily Curriculum. I'm Michelle with The Autism Helper. I'm a TK through 2nd grade self-contained teacher, and this is my classroom. Today I want to show you how I set up and organize my curriculum for the entire year with using the Level Daily Curriculum. As a self-contained teacher in my 8th year of teaching, I highly recommend using the Autism Helpers Level Daily Curriculum in your classroom, and here's why. First, you get a full year's worth of curriculum for your students that you prep one time and you get to use every day. Next, there are 8 different subjects that the Level Daily Curriculum covers, so there is something for everybody. And each different subject has at least 5 levels, so so that you're able to differentiate instruction in your classroom with ease. And last but not least, the curriculum is evidence-based, but it's also routine-based. So my students do really well and learn so much because the curriculum follows a strict routine. And there is data that is embedded within the curriculum. So I'm able to write my goals off of the curriculum and then take data every day. Quickly, before I get into how I set up and organize my curriculum, I wanted to give you a glimpse inside each of the different levels that I'm working on this year with my students. So Level 0.5 is a lot of emerging skills, and students are tracing, they're matching shapes, they're identifying shape vocabulary. And you can see the curriculum, not only is it repetitive, but it's scaffolded. So students are tracing large numbers with lines and starting points, but as the curriculum furthers, those tracing skills increase for the students. The visuals are decreased and students are just learning how to be more independent with their writing. Level 1 is a lot of quantity identification, matching, and then some writing where students are writing without the tracing prompts. They're writing within baseline here. Students continue on to identify numbers and shape vocabulary, as well as big and little. This is just up until Unit 3, so skills get more difficult, but also continue to be repetitive. Level 1.5, students are working on counting quantities, and I always teach my students to cross off the pictures as they're counting. This is a great way to teach those counting skills. Students are also working on word vocabulary in here, And then we get into money, time, and addition. And then Level 2 is, it's very similar to Level 1.5, but it has more difficulties here. Students are writing word numbers. Students are counting quantities and matching to the number word. They're adding, working on time, and money identification as well. I know you're wondering how I figure out which level students are at. I am a Curriculum Access member. Now I know you don't know what Curriculum Access is, and that's okay. Curriculum Access is just a way for your school to pay for the curriculum for you, and everything is web-based and it's very organized for you. But you can still use the curriculum without Curriculum Access. Having access to the Curriculum Access on the autismhelper.com gives me access to the placement assessments, and these are what help me easily determine what level my students are working at. And I don't— you don't have to have these placement assessments to determine what levels your students are working at, and I'll show you how to do that in a little bit. However, these are what the placement assessment look— looks like. This is the language placement assessment number 1, and as you can see, the student scored 100% Following the rubric, I'm able to tell that my student can either do Level Assessment 2 or I can have them do Level 1.5. I decided to see what he knew, so I moved him along to the Language Assessment 2, and he scored 22% on this. So I determined, using the rubric again, that below 40% because he scored 100% on the first placement assessment, he could go ahead and do Level 1.5 for language arts. For math, he did really well with the math placement assessment as well. The first one, he scored 95%, so I decided to do the Placement Assessment 2, which was a little bit more difficult for him, but not much. He still scored really well, scored 48%. And so here this tells me he needs to do Level 2. Now, if you don't have access to the placement assessments, that's okay. You can take 1 or 2 pages from the curriculum. I would do the, the pretest and maybe, um, a pretest from another unit so that you can see how they're scoring, and then continue on through the levels. And and just give the unit pretests until you find that they have difficulty, and then that, that means that they should be in that level. Once I have all of my student levels, I begin printing all of the pages for the curriculum, and it uses quite a bit of paper initially. So you can see my levels, or my booklets, only go up to Unit 3. Sometimes depending on the student, I will print up 4 units or 5 units. However, um, for this I just printed 3 units. Once I have everything printed, I like to use red for math, but you can use any color really. I use my coils and my binding machine, and I make my booklets with the coils and the binding machine. Another element of the curriculum are the visuals, the anchor charts. So I make sure to always prep my anchor charts at the beginning of the school year, and I have this binder here I use this for easy grabbing so that I can give my students the anchor charts when they're ready, and I organize them by different levels. And not only do I prep the anchor charts, I also prep the implementation guide and the extension activity ideas. And this helps if I have a paraprofessional run my center for the day or if I have a substitute running my center for the day. So you can see I have all of my anchor charts, right here. So all I have to do is pull them, um, so students can look at those while they're working. In my classroom, I also use the Language Arts Level Daily Curriculum. So you can see I have my anchor charts prepped here in the same binder, the same format. And this is for my paraprofessional. She runs this center, but you can tell that everything is the same for each center. So we want to make sure that we're being consistent with how we are teaching the curriculum in the classroom. All right, here is my language arts curriculum. You can see each student has their own cubby. This shelf was here when I started working, and I found that this is just the best use of this shelf to keep all the students' work separate and labeled. All right, now this is my center, my math center, and you can see I organize my curriculum with these file cabinets. I purchased these from IKEA, and these are great because they just pull out. When I change center groups, all I have to do is move the file, and I organize these by center. So this is Center 1, this is Center 2, Center 3, 4, 5, and 6. So this is just a really great way for me to be able to quickly pull the curriculum and work on it with my students. Down here is where I keep all of the extension activities that I might be using for the day or the week or the month. Now the initial setup and organization of the Level Daily Curriculum might be a lot of work. It does take a lot of work. However, it's okay to start it a little bit later within the school year because your students will catch up. And what I like to do is work on prepping the curriculum and then working on the extension activities with my students while we're prepping the curriculum. I didn't start my curriculum until about 4 or 5 weeks in the school year, and my students are still learning and they're doing great. And yes, it is a lot of work, but I highly recommend putting in that work because once you initially set it up and teach yourself how to use this curriculum, it just comes natural, and it's so much easier year after year to get started with your students. Circle all of the same number. What number is this? 11. You're looking for all of the 11s, and you can make a circle. Amazing! Keep going. No, we just want one circle. Perfect! Keep going. No thank you. Yes, perfect. You did it. You have one more 11. Do you see it? Yeah. You found it. What number? Keep going. Two. That's correct. Good job. Awesome. Wow, I love those circles! There's one more. See if you can find it. To see more of my self-contained classroom and how I use the curriculum in my classroom, like and subscribe to The Autism Helper on YouTube, and check out our website at theautismhelper.com.