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Responses to Online Questions Kate: We're so glad to have all of you joining us. We know that we'll have a number of other people coming in as we get going. People have to slide in very quickly. If you've not completed the poll that we've up for the last few minutes about which webinar or Study Group this is for you, if you would take a moment, it is up on top of the chat pod. And put your answer in. We have a very special guest joining us today, Susan Weigert with the Office of Special Education and rehab services with the Department of Education in Washington D.C. Susan, let us know what you're doing or that you're here, we're glad to have you joining us. Charlotte: She's typing something for us right now. Kate: We're especially excited to have Susan with us today because as you know we are focusing on legitimate to the-- to the-- to the standard curriculum and talking about how you can use an active learning approach to provide instruction in the core curriculum. So this is really great. We're glad that you're there. And we'll-- Susan is here, she says hi, I'm here, thank you for inviting me. We're awfully glad that you could accept. Okay. We want to just run through a couple of housekeeping things while we're getting going. Two more dates for study groups, the next one March 30th, the last one May 25th of this year. We're hoping that in March we're going to be having a group of people from the Narbethong school in Australia, share with us what they are doing with active learning and how they are using it to teach everything pretty much in their school. So we're real excited about that. Also, we want to remind you guys that we do record all of these and archive them and in your handout you will see a link to the active learning space.org/webinars, this is under resources, you can go there and link to all of the archived webinars for our Active Learning Study Group and take a look at them if I've missed some and need to play catch‑up. Also remind you on our active learning space website you can go in there and sign up to get our newsletters and these are just very short newsletters. Not going to take a lot of your time, but kind of keep you abreast of any new things that we're putting on our website and some things that you may be interested like training activities, stuff like that. Charlotte: I wanted to say also, Kate, that the newsletter seems to end up in people's spam sometimes. [ Laughter ]. If you have gotten any for a while, please do take a look. We're trying to resolve that, but until we do we want to make sure that you find it. Kate: Great. We also want to point out that there is a spot on the active learning space website for you to submit questions and we really have been so pleased with the number of questions that we've gotten. They've give very much us ideas for new materials to create, new things to include on the website. And speaking of that, we're going to go right to ‑‑ Charlotte: Could we say one thing about that first? One thing that I wanted to say about the question is that it's a wonderful problem that we have. We have so many questions that it's kind of-- unwieldy at the moment. We want you to know very high on our list is trying to organize those topically so that it will be easier to search. So be patient and know that that's on its way. We're working regularly to update the site and add new things and organize it in a way that makes it easier to search. Kate: Thank, Charlotte. I appreciate you sharing that. We're going to get right to our question of the Study Group for this month. And that question comes from Trish, who is with Narbethong school. She says I'm just wondering what your response is to comments from people about active learning environments. For example, the Little Room, SPG boards, MFA tables, active vests et cetera being too busy or too cluttered for students with visual impairments or students who are deafblind. We had a number of responses that I'll share with you. First one we got was from iris who said: I also heard that the SPG board that I made for a student was too busy. But as someone on this site told me, the SPG isn't necessarily a visual activity. It's more of a sensory motor activity. Keeping that in mind, I do find when a student finds something exciting on the board like crinkly paper they will look at it. It's all about the students' independent exploration and building up spatial memory to remember where certain objects are located on the board. I think that's a great response from iris, we appreciate you chiming in there. My response was when I had the opportunity to hear presentations from Dr. Nielsen before her death, she stressed having plenty of objects in an environment for the student. And what I see frequently is people putting too few objects in the environments. And if you think about the number of objects that a typically developing child interacts with during the course of one day or in the course of one hour in your living room floor, [ Laughter ], more is better than less. I think it is important to remember that objects need to have a variety of properties, such as things that make noise, vibrate, have different temperature, can change shape, have different color and so forth. And I agree that though the child is working with an SPG board, they may not look at what they explore. They may primarily be using touch to find objects and looking may occur at some other point or in a different activity. Like iris said if you make the objects interesting to the child and keep in mind what visual skills are presents when selecting objects, looking might happen as well as the tactile exploration. And now from Patty, this was her response. Charlotte: I wanted to mention Patty is on the line. Kate: Patty, you are on the line. Let me read the response and Patty if you have other comments that you would like to put in that would be great. Her response was when working on a vision yes, yes, you might want to declutter the environment to assist a child in focusing or seeing that specific item. You are encouraging vision responses. But remember it is important to encourage activity for the child in all areas of development, not only vision. Think about your world. It is filled with things to look at. If you look around an office, you probably have thousands of things to look at. Do you sit and stare at things all day not moving and only using your vision? No. You interact with those items through your own senses. You isolate one or a few things to use and interact with, as far as the objects, we grasp, move, touch, push, explore, smell, listen, bang, et cetera. We use our strength in vision to pique our interest and then use ... for a visually impaired child we need to provide the same environment through other mediums. Their world should be filled with thousands of things that have tactile, auditory, gustatory and other activities to stimulate the child's activity. The world should be built on the child's strengths and build on the strengths to impact their areas of weakness. Even though the world is filled with stimulation, a child will select one or two things to interact with at a time. The ... and motivation. The child can use the sensory inputs he or she needs to learn about the world, eventually using all of the senses to create a picture of the world and how to act in that world. That is why it is important to have environments that are enriched to promote active learning. Decide what the goal of the activity is and provide the right environment for the child to be motivated to engage in that activity. [Multiple voices]. I know Ellen and Erin a number of you work with students with TBI, I think that's particularly a question that comes up with children with-- with CVI, I would be interested to hear what kinds of reactions that you are getting ‑‑ [speaker interrupted ‑‑ multiple voices] Kate: I think really the key thing is to be very aware of what goal you are working on. You know, working on a vision goal in a Little Room may not be what you want to work on. That may be a totally different thing. Just trying to think about your materials in your environment and build them to-- to serve the function of the-- of that lesson that you are trying to have the child or the goals that you are trying to have the child work on and develop. Interestingly enough, one of the things that we're thinking about doing next year as a topic in our Study Group is to really look into questions like active learning for the CVI student, hopefully we can share more information. Diane what do you say? Belinda says-- [Reading comments]. Things are not getting tangled together. Move the few items that you have in various arrangements. Many options to suit your own need for that student. Then we have Diane Sheline. She says I agree that the Little Room focuses not just on vision, uses CVI [indiscernible] for vision only. Okay. Margarita and Maribel said ... [Reading comments]. [ Laughter ]. Erin says ... [Reading comments]. That's a whole other thing to talk about, we'll have to-- to think about that. Matt: Points out how important it is to get data and let the data drive your decisions. Ellen added I think Patty is completely correct. There is benefit to both cluttered [Reading comments]. So that's great. I'm glad that you all have a lot to say on this. I can see and Sara, also, as a parent, so glad that you could join us today, Sara. [Reading comments]. Thanks for all of those. Kate: Thanks for the feedback. [Multiple voices] Patty: I was going to say can you finally hear me, sorry. I just wanted to comment a couple of people mentioned about the items being all tangled together. So I don't know whether or not people are trying to use the elastic with the tubing over it because the tubing really helps items from being tangled together. Charlotte: Right. Tubing and I think that's on one of our videos isn't it showing those? [Multiple voices]. If it's not up yet-- if it's not up yet, we do hope to show if people don't know what Patty means. Laura says the tubing helps so much. Kate: Really does make a difference. Tubing like you can get at an aquarium-- a lot of people will get parents to give them the tubing from their G tube stuff. And then they clean it up and use it. Charlotte: Exactly. Kate: It does make a difference, really does. Chapter 2. Student Goals, General Curriculum & Active Learning Charlotte: I know a lot of people are typing in comments, still, but [Multiple voices] we do have recorded versions so speaker interrupted ‑‑ multiple voices] Kate: Keep looking. I don't want us to get lost. We may come back again, keep chatting amongst ourselves that's always a good thing to do. Our goals to today we want to talk about how to align goals for students with significant multiple disabilities with the standard or general curriculum and then take a look at ways to implement the curriculum using an active learning approach. We're going to be actually looking at a couple of kiddos doing that. First of all, we want to talk a little bit about what do we actually mean when we're talking about a curriculum. And that is defined as a set course of study and it is determined at various levels. We know that there-- that many states look to a national core curriculum in Texas, we always like to do our own things, our own way. We have our Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills curriculum that we use. Many districts have preferred curriculums that we want to use and even as far as the school campus may do that. So-- so curriculums abound, so we're going to take a look at some things that are related to a particular curriculum, but first we're going to do a poll. And Matt if you would help pull up polls in your room, I will get this up here. We're going to ask you guys if any of you use a set curriculum. So if you all could take a minute and vote we would appreciate that. Give you a second here. Interesting. It looks like a lot of you are not using a specific curriculum. I guess I'm sort of surprised with that. Charlotte: If anyone is feeling a little shy about answering that, we don't know who you are. We don't have someone from OSEP here just to follow up on this [ Laughter ]. So we just want to know because it helps us in our planning and thinking about how to get information out there. Kate: Right. Okay. I think everybody is pretty much-- people are voting. We will leave it up for a little bit more. But I think what we want to do now is we want to move on to the prerecorded portion of our webinar. So I guess we'll magically disappear for a few minutes and you're going to see Charlotte. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Charlotte: Many people wonder if there's a set curriculum for active learning. That's kind of a complicated question. Dr. Lilli Neilsen created the FIELA curriculum 730 Learning Environments, which is available through LilliWorks. FIELA stands for Flexible Individual Enriched Level Appropriate. It's not a curriculum, per se, but rather the book presents 730 activities that are sequenced in developmental order. Dr. Nielsen describes behaviors for developmental levels from birth to 48 months, four years, in three month increments. You use it to select activities so that you can have a bank of activities or lesson plans for the week. You plan one thing, but then you have other activity options if that's what the student prefers. You must also be prepared for the fact that a child may not want to work on the activity that you had planned on that day. You need to be ready with other ideas, as with the FIELA curriculum and the bank of activities. You could really call it an appetizer to the thousands of activities that are available. It can be used as a guide when designing appropriate individualized learning activities. The team begins by deciding which types of learning environments will best meet the individual learners' needs. For example, a priority might be to help the learner feel comfortable and prone and activities might be designing using a support beverage. The FIELA curriculum alternates between fine and gross matter activities each day. Dr. Nielsen notes that learners at these early phases will not get enough movement in just one period of physical education class each week. Because many learners in the early stages of development are unable to express their preferences, alternating these helps to ensure that a range of skill areas are addressed regularly. It should be noted that other skill areas are embedded throughout the day so that the communication, cognitive development, vision, et cetera, are incorporated into both degrees and fine motor activities. In this way, more than one skill area can be addressed in an activity, but this means that you as the teacher need to know what your goals are for a given lesson. The goals might reflect communication, cognition, spatial awareness, emotional development, auditory awareness, tactile awareness, motor development, et cetera. It's up to the adult to adapt each activity to meet the child's needs and to work on the appropriate goal at the appropriate time. Dr. Nielsen specifies that there should be at least one 30 to 45‑minute adult‑child interaction per day, throughout the day a decision should be made about when the adult will be a direct part of a learning activity or rather acting in more of a support role to facilitate the child's learning. For example, during an offering activity, the adult may have a significant role, such as in the video we watched last time with Jack and Cindy. In others, such as when a child is in a little room, the adult may be more of an observer. The important point to remember is that active learning is an approach. So while you can use the FIELA curriculum to help you structure the day and to match developmentally appropriate activities and materials with an individual student, you can also use an active learning approach with other curriculum models. The key is really to begin by providing the individual student with an enriched learning environment, which is fully accessible to him or her based on individual needs. This means that the learner is positioned in such a way that he or she can initiate activity and be actively engaged. Next, it's essential to follow an educational approach that focuses on process rather than product. This means that if you're doing a crafts activity, you set it up so that the students can be as independent as possible and can initiate exploration and experimentation. For example, in the image on the side here, the learners played with colored popcorn and glue. The adult cut out the leaves, stems and flower petals ahead of time. The children were given containers of popcorn to play with. Some children ate the popcorn, some raked their fingers through the popcorn, cups and spoons were added to allow the children to scoop into containers or practice scooping with utensils. After a period glue was added, the children played with the stickiness of the popcorn, bringing both hands to midline, grasping or rubbing the popcorn off their hands, pulling the kernels apart, et cetera. Similarly when carving pump kitchens, the learners reached into the pumpkins to feel the seeds and insides of the pumpkins. The goal was not to have a perfectly carved jack‑o‑lantern, but rather encourage participation. In addition to the learning environment and structural process another essential component of active learning he is the materials that are used. It's important to have both a large variety and a large quantities of materials. At the beginning of today's session, we discussed the question about whether certain environments or materials are too busy or too cluttered for students with a visual impairment or for students who are DeafBlind. There are numerous guidelines on the active learning space website, including attractive objects, tips for choosing materials, points to consider when choosing materials, and sources for materials. We hope that you'll explore what we've posted there. It's important to remember the different skill areas can be embedded in other activities. For example, if a child is in a little room, the emphasis may be on the development of fine and gross motor skills, but the child may also be working on communication by vocalizing. Similar, the learner is developing cognitive skills about the position of items as well as their various attributes. Sometimes TVIs worry that there is not a specific vision goal in every active learning activity. This doesn't mean that the child is not using his or her vision during each activity. It's just that the priorities shift depending on the focus of a particular lesson. When you think about it, participation frequently involves a movement component, either gross or fine motor or both. But movement isn't the only purpose in an activity. For example, when typing on the computer, there's a fine motor component, but it's frequently a cognitive activity. Every activity has other components to it. Auditory, movement, visual, tactile, emotional, social and cognitive. One of the issues often raised by instructors related to active learning is that it looks like "Play". This makes it difficult to explain how the child is actually focused on the same important work that engages the time of students without these significant challenges. Active learning is an instructional approach for individuals of all stages who are still developmentally in the sensory motor and preoperational stages of learning. It can be used to teach almost any content at a developmentally appropriate level for these learners. We have looked at ways in which an active learning approach can be used as a general educational approach and as a guide to developing a learning program. We're now going to shift our attention to the alignment of the general curriculum with a learning-- with the learning needs of students with significant multiple disabilities. As a brief review, it's important to start with an appropriate assessment tool such as the functional scheme assessment or a comparable tool that measures developmental levels from birth to 48 months. This tool is used to determine a students' current performance level. In our last Study Group session, we looked at the creation of IEP goals. The IEP team should meet to identify priorities for the individual and it's critical that families be included in these discussions. Finally, you will need to look at the standard curriculum used by your school or district or state. In some cases, such as in Australia, there may be a national curriculum. So this partly depend on where the student lives. As you review the priorities for the student, check to see which area of the general curriculum is related to these skills at early developmental levels. For example, fine and gross motor skills align with science, math, fine arts and physical education and communication aligns with reading and language arts. Most curricula begins at the kindergarten level. What does this mean for student who are at a developmental level below that? For the learners we're discussing here, we're looking at developmental levels from birth to 48 months. There are two ways to align their goals and educational programs with general curriculum. First, you can modify the curriculum. Modifications mean that there are adjustments to the expectations and/or performance criteria when a student is unable to meet the expectations of the general curriculum. In this case, schools may simplify or modify an activity using partial participation. This approach is often preferred in classrooms where a student with significant learning needs is fully included with peers who are the same age. Another approach is to look at the prerequisite skills that come before a given skill in the general curriculum. We looked at the Texas Early Learning Pathways in our last meeting and we're going to look at some other examples today. The key point in any approach is an unbiased look at whether or not the child is actually learning anything. This means looking at whether or not the IEP goals are incorporated into the activity and whether or not progress is being made toward these goals. You may live in a state or a district that has a specific protocol for learners who are at a developmental level below the general curriculum. But we wanted to give you some other examples of tools that you can look at. Many of you are familiar with the Common Core State Standards. I know that they are a politically charged topic, but whatever you think about them, and regardless of whether or not your state has adopted them, they do provide a framework for math and English language arts or ELA, curriculum standards. Since they began at the kindergarten level, you will need to find a way to identify prerequisite skills. Last time we looked at Texas Early Learning Pathways and another tool that many states use is called the Dynamic Learning Maps. We're going to look at that in greater detail in just a couple of minutes. Let's go back to prerequisite skills. We talked a bit about this in our last session, but I would like to revisit this document from OSERS or the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Dated November 14th, 2015. It states on Page 5 that "Alternate academic achievement standards must be aligned with the state's grade level content standards. The standards must be clearly related to grade level content, although they may be restricted in scope or complexity or take the form of introductory or prerequisite skills." Teaching prerequisite skills is clearly acceptable by the guidelines established by the United States Department of Education. Let's look at some examples beginning with math. In this example, we're looking at kindergarten level for the domain of measurement and data. The first general standard is to describe and compare measurable attributes and the second one is to classify objects and count the number of objects in each category. In the domain of geometry, the standard here is to identify and describe shapes. So what happens if a student is at a developmental level below kindergarten? A few minutes ago, I mentioned Dynamic Learning Maps and I would like to look at those again now. These are specific statements of knowledge and skills called essential elements, which are linked to the grade level expectations identified in the Common Core State Standards. The purpose is to build a bridge from the content in the Common Core State Standards to academic expectations for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. So on this slide, we see the same cluster of standards from the Common Core, but here you will notice in the column on the right the essential elements listed are to classify objects according to attributes, big, small, heavy and light. Now let's go back to the Texas Early Learning Pathways which is a tool we looked at in our last session. In this slide we are looking for math skills for children at a developmental level from birth to 48 months. The goals listed here are for a childbirth to eight months, developmental level, turns objects over to look at them and handle them from different positions. For a child at 8 to 18 months developmental level, enjoys taking objects in and out of containers. How can we put this altogether using an active learning approach. I'm going to show you a three minute video clip that Sky High Institute was kind enough to give us permission to use. I apologize for the rather poor quality of the tape. It was transferred from a VHS. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End [ Video end: ] Charlotte: So was this child working on math skills? Absolutely. He was playing with sets of comparable items, balls and cylinders, what was he doing with this? He was comparing attributes, heavy, light, big, little, rough, smooth. Was there a lot of talking in the video? No. This is a great example of an active learning approach, because he was set up with large quantity of a wide variety of materials. The materials were organized in a shallow cake tin to keep him where he could find them. A lot of people say they can't implement an active learning approach because their schools don't have a big enough budget. Do you think these things cost a lot of money? Maybe under $5 altogether. And itinerant teachers often wonder how can they implement an active learning approach because they travel so much. What do you think? Are these materials portable? Absolutely. Can they be carried over at home? You bet. I hope this example helps you to-- example helps you to think about ways to implement math activities using an active learning approach. Let's go on to English language arts. For learners at the birth to 48 month developmental level, the focus is really on communication as the foundation for literacy. As we can see, the skills in this area, at the birth to eight month level, are enjoys looking at and touching books and listening, cuddles, looks, reaches, mouths. Focuses attention during familiar songs and rhymes. Focuses attention as a caregiver points to pictures and symbols. If we switch now to the Dynamic Learning Maps for ELA at the kindergarten level, you can see the standards from the left‑hand column and the essential elements in the right‑hand column. Again, communication and literacy are intertwined at this level. The goals are to identify familiar people places, things and events and visual or tactile displays such as object symbols related to activities. The goals are to identify familiar people, places, things and events and visual or tactile displays such as object symbols related to activities. These are communication goals that are prerequisites for literacy and reading. So what does this look like using an active learning approach? Well, peg board books are one great example we wanted to share today. You can see some examples on the active learning space website. With a peg board book, such as the one shown on this page, items are attached to peg board pages with elastic or capable ties which enables the learner to explore and manipulate them without having them disappear. This example shows brushes, beads, and other tactile items attached to the pages. One classroom I know has created theme‑based peg board books. Experience books and story boxes are other examples of English language arts activities that could be done using an active learning approach. Depending what developmental stage the learner is in, you can think about how to adapt a literacy activity using the various techniques of offering, imitation, interaction, sharing the work and consequences. You can learn more about the five phases of educational treatment on the active learning space site. We're going to look now at another video clip and in this clip you will see Matt working with a student who is deafblind visiting a drum store. Later in the video, you will see Jarvis sharing a tactile book with his speech therapist about this experience. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End [Drumming]. Matt: Jarvis, you are scared, it's okay, it's okay. That will help. [Drumming]. Bong, bong, bong. Bong, bong, bong. Jarvis's turn? He's holding on pretty tight. Bong, bong. Speech therapist: Exploring, the drums, wow! Door, yeah. Turn the page. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom ... [Continues saying boom, boom]. Exploring the drum store! Yay! [ Laughter ] [ Video end: ] Charlotte: You may have noticed Jarvis was emotionally not able to play the drum himself. He was both overly excited and a little afraid. Matt provides emotional support by not demanding that Jarvis touch the drum himself. This was a great example of the hand‑underhand technique. With his speech therapist, you may have noticed that she let Jarvis lead the conversation. When he wanted to talk about the big drum, for example, she makes a switch to follow his lead. It's also worth noting that she didn't insist that Jarvis' signs be exact. Another point that is worth noting here is that Jarvis is actively engaged in all phases of this experience. Both in the drum store and with the tactile book. He is demonstrating that he understands and makes the connection between the experience itself and the tactile symbols represented it. His joy speaks for itself. Now we'll see another clip which shows how a literacy activity can be done with a child using the interaction technique. We wanted to include an example of a learner at a much higher developmental level than we often think about for children with active learning. In this video, note that Patty is using strategies at both interaction and sharing the work from the five phases. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Patty: Yellow, I have all of the pieces, we have to glue them on and then we'll make a puppet. Do you want to try? We are going to try to make this. Okay. All right. Let's try-- those are my puppets. Student: [Indiscernible]. Patty: So first to make our puppet, we're going to put it in the bag like this, he will go wonka, once we put his face on. Student: [Indiscernible] Patty: I don't have [indiscernible]. I only have sesame street. Student: [Indiscernible] Patty: Yeah. All right. You want me to put the glue or do you want to? Student: Me. Patty: Rub it. I got a stick for me, too. Perfect. We can do it together. Student: What are you going to make? Patty: this one is going to be Elmo. Student: What is Trevor going to make? Patty: Trevor, what do you want him to make? Student: Grover. Patty: Okay. Put this on the bag. Go like this. Put it down like this. Student: I want to take it home. Patty: You can take it home. Push. All right. Like that. Okay. Now we need-- eyebrows, eyes? Do you want to do the eyes? Student: Where is Ernie at? Patty: We will have to make Ernie. He's orange, right? We can make an orange one for Ernie. Do you want to put his eyes on. Here's his eyes, we have the blue on the back. Student: I love Sesame Street. Patty: You do. Here's glue. Here's glue. You want to do it that way? How about this way? I'll do mine. If I put the glue on, do you want to push him on? I put the glue on. You put it on the bag. Student: Here? Right here? Patty: I would put his eyes up here. There you go, perfect. Okay. Do you want me to put the glue on that one. Student: You do it. Patty: I do it. Okay. Student: How much are you going to make? Patty: I don't know. Glue is on. Do the other eye. Perfect. Okay. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Charlotte: Notice that she gives him lots of choices, such as what do we need, a nose or a mouth? When he asks her to do it, she does. She provides feedback in a friendly, non‑threatening way, such as uh‑oh, you have it on the wrong side. She frequently asks him, what do you think? She asks questions such as what's he missing? Rather than telling him what he's missing. These are among the strategies that demonstrate an active learning approach. We wanted to show you an area on the active learning space site where you can look at ideas for active learning and general education. It's under the implementation tab. If you go to that page you would see two examples of videos with science lessons that use an active learning approach. Again, we look at prerequisite skills, but this time in science. These goals focus on comparing and contrasting materials and comparing parts of a plant. The curriculum goals here focus on exploring physical properties of materials and identifying changes that can occur in physical properties. We can take these standards from the TEKS or the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills and create a sample IEP goal for a student using an active learning approach. It might sound like this: By the end of the IEP completion date, given a variety of materials used in various science units, in combination with perceptualizing aid ... [Reading slide]. So what would this look like? Well, we're going to see two short video clips of examples. In the first one, we'll see Jack, who was shown here using a support bench. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Narrator: As the video begins, we see Jack exploring with both his hands and bare feet. There are rocks in the tub of water and pine cones in the tub of dirt. Jack vocalizes while moving his hands in the water. The radio is on in the background. Patty places pine cones amidst the rocks in the water near Jack's hands. Jack moves the rocks with his hands. After pausing, he splashes some more and moves the rocks with his hands. Patty arrives and lies down on the floor next to Jack. Notice that she does not speak immediately. Jake vocalizes and Patty places more rocks in the water. [Making noises]. [ Video end: ] Charlotte: If we go back to our science goals from the Texas Early Learning Pathways, they were puts objects in mouth, looks at or touches objects, begins to repeat actions to get an effect, plays with and explores toys that move or make sounds over and over. Cause and effect. The lesson with Jack on the support bench addressed each of these. Here's or final example of the day, this is another science lesson, this one shows a girl in a HOPSA dress. In a previous lesson in the classroom, the girl that you will see in this video was sitting in her wheelchair with a group of other students, all of whom were in wheelchairs. The teacher was doing a lesson about plants and had each student touch the small plant in a pot that was passed around in a circle from one student to the next. Watch how the same science goals can be addressed using an active learning approach. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Narrator: Kyra moves between the seeds and the soil containers several times. Time passes. And once again she goes from the seed container to the soil container, then to the water container, and after a time she moves from the water container to the bucket containing the large hosta plant. She explores with her feet and with her hand and tries to pick up the entire plant. Before dropping it. But she is able to pull off a piece of leaf, which she immediately places in her mouth and begins to chew on it again. [ Video end: ] Chapter 3. Assignment for Next Session Charlotte: For the next session, we invite you to share other ideas you have for an active learning activity that focuses on some of the math, ELA or science goals that we addressed today. Such as classifying objects according to attributes, big, small, heavy, light. Visual or tactile displays, such as object symbols, relating to activities. To classify matter based on physical properties. To identify changes that can occur in the physical properties of the ingredients or solutions. And you can email us at charlotte.cushman@perkins.org. For larger files please use the links to DropBox in your handouts. [ Video end: ] Well, I could see a lot of wonderful conversation happening in the chat box and-- and I think there were a lot of wheels spinning as you were watching that. So thank you, everyone. Our captioner is going to need to leave promptly at the top of the hour. So I wanted to be sure that we had time to have a couple of conversations from some of our special guests today. But if you need to leave right at the top of the hour, please do. We'll be staying here as long as there's some people around we will be here. So, all of that being said, Susan Weigert, we were wondering if there was anything in particular that you wanted to say to the group if you would like to speak on the phone or use your audio, you can just do star six and we can see that you are typing and that's also fine. Patty, I hope that if you want to say something you are welcome to jump in as well. I can see there are a couple more people who are typing. Patty: I just wanted to tell you that I thought that you did a great job showing the videos and examples of how to do the curriculum with active learning. I thought that was really well done today. Kate: Thanks, Patty, we're learning, you're teaching us. Charlotte: It's a lot of information so it's good to have it recorded. If you need to go back and look at it again. I know a number of classrooms sit down together to kind of hash it out, like how would we do this. There are links to the Dynamic Learning Maps and the Common Core and the Texas Learning Pathways in your handouts. So it was necessarily very fast today. But we hope that you'll go back and look and check out the videos with people because there's a lot there. If you have questions or comments after today, we also invite you to continue to write on the-- on the site. Kate: Susan says, I'm not on the phone but would like to encourage your teachers to use the alternate content standards to ensure that active learning lessons are aligned to the standard. Great. In this way, you provide access to the general education curriculum. And I think that's a real-- I'm so grateful for you being here Susan, to say that, because I think there is a lot of confusion across the nation about-- about one, how to do it. But also that it is appropriate to focus on prerequisite skills. And we know that not every student needs to be at prerequisite skills. We're not advocating that. But for students who are at this very, very low developmental level, this is appropriate and this is how we're going to get them up there where we they can do those, they can actually get into the real general curriculum. But they've got to start from where they are first. Ellen, you say download files on the bottom right is not highlighted. How do we get the roster and handouts? Well, hum. It is on mine. Where you can go and do that. Matt: If you click on like the sign‑in roster, it should highlight it blue, and then you should be able to hit download. Charlotte: I wanted to mention that Susan wrote concept development and communication skills are the foundation of access to the general education curriculum. And again it's just so helpful to all of us, Susan, to have you valid dating what we know and-- validating what we know and believe in our guts, but sometimes it's challenged by principals or the general Ed teacher doesn't know what the teacher for visually impaired is talking about, so that is really helpful. Kate: It is. It says for Texas teachers, please reach out to your ESC or support specialists to assist with IEP goals and lesson development. If you need additional help. That is so true. Our low incidence disabilities contacts, our VI contacts and deaf and hard of hearing contacts are really great resources to help with that alignment in Texas. Charlotte: Jennifer Coady is asking what is the alternate content standards. Susan replied the dynamic learning maps essential elements constitute one version of alternate achievement standard and Texas may have their own. Again, there are people from all over the country, in fact all over the world on here, so I encourage you to go on to look at the Dynamic Learning Maps, again the-- the URL is in your handouts or you can Google it and just check it out. I think it will make a little more sense. Ellen, I think our tech people are going to help you. And Amy mentions in Ohio it's called the Ohio academic content standards extended on the ODE website. Thanks for mentioning that Amy. I know Massachusetts, where Perkins is based, also has their own form of it. Many states have their own form, but again just to kind of get the hang of it, if you don't know bit, Dynamic Learning Maps is a great place to start. Kate: Texas has... in addition to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, it has... both kindergarten and prekindergarten guidelines and also has... a document of essential elements. So-- let's see. Charlotte: Couple more people are still typing in. Kate: Well, we're so pleased that all of you were able to join us. We're going to stay here for a while, I know that we need to get that code up for people that need the credit hours. Guys if you will run the code information, we will be quiet for a little while. [End of captioning]. [Silence] Fade up from black. Animation: Text for TSBVI transform into braille cells for TSBVI. Fade to black.