3 tips to get your special education students more engaged and interested in learning

3 tips to get your special education students more engaged and interested in learning

1. Tip #1: Play to your students interests/strengths Your students or kids likely have one or more interests or passions. As teachers and parents, it's important to get to know these interests and weave them into your teaching. For example, if your student is an amazing artist, instead of just leveraging art as a reward for assignment completion, try to incorporate art into the assignments. For writing assignments, you can have your students use their artistic strengths to draw out a story map for their writing. For math problems, you can encourage your students to make drawings to help them conceptualize the material. For other interests such as movies or super heroes, you can find ways to incorporate these into learning as well. For example, if your student loves Star Wars, you can ask math questions with Star Wars themed questions.

2. Tip #2 Choices to complete assignments Give your students choices to complete assignments. For example, if you typically have your students demonstrate their understanding in the form of worksheets, you can instead give them options of different ways to demonstrate understanding. Some ideas might be to have them make a video, label a drawing, write a blog post, or make a poster. Give your students the agency to choose the method in which they complete assignments.

3. Tip #3 Provide instructional content in a variety of ways In order for your students to be engaged and interested in content, it is important to provide content in a variety of ways. Instead of just asking students to engage with material through reading books, you can give them the option to listen to recordings or the books, watch videos with similar content to the reading, or teach different concepts through song.

At Diverse Learning Hub, we’ve taken the traditional paper based social stories and transformed them into engaging animated social story videos. We have also now added social story songs. Through this example, you can see how we’ve taken something traditional such as social stories and transformed them into diverse pieces of content for your students to engage with

. I hope you enjoyed these tips! Stay tuned for more!

For more social stories, songs, meditations for kids with autism, check out: http://www.diverselearninghub.com