Middle school math students come to your class with varying needs and abilities! Accommodations are adjustments made to the environment, curriculum, or assessment that make it possible for students to learn and succeed.
How is this different from a modification?
Years ago, the special education teacher on my campus, Ms. Mease, explained the difference between accommodations and modifications like this: she placed a sticky note high on the wall and asked our shortest staff member to get it down. When the short staff member couldn’t reach the sticky note, Ms. Mease provided her with a small stool – the accommodation. To explain a modification, when the short staff member couldn’t reach it, Ms. Mease pulled the sticky note down within reach of the short staff member.
In short, accommodations are tools that help students access the material. Modifications alter the material.
There are probably about 100 different ways to accommodate math in a middle school classroom: preferred seating, offering breaks, extra time, using manipulatives, and the list goes on. Chances are, you are already doing many of these things daily for some or all of your students! For today’s purposes, we are only going to talk about using accommodations with Maneuvering the Middle’s All Access curriculum.
6 Ways to Accommodate MTM to Reach Learners
Learn more about All Access here!
1. Pre-teach key vocabulary and concepts using our Word Wall (helps ELL students too)
Pre-teaching vocabulary is an excellent accommodation that allows students to be familiar with terms before they encounter the terms in your instruction or the curriculum. This is especially beneficial for students who are not as familiar with English. To pre-teach or just teach vocabulary, you will need a student-friendly definition and a visual representation.
This can be done during the lesson’s warm-up or at the beginning of the unit. Either way, All Access includes a 5th grade through Algebra 1 Word Wall with 240 terms! Print, assemble, and then post on your classroom wall. Don’t have All Access? You can get our Middle School Math Word Wall here.
2. Provide a copy of student notes
Providing a student copy of notes was an accommodation I used regularly as a teacher! For some students, the act of writing notes and following what the teacher is saying is a huge task. They could either listen fully or copy notes fully but they couldn’t do both well. This accommodation did not give me extra work either! I would print a student handout, complete what I called the exemplar for my own use, and then make copies for my students who needed this accommodation. When it was time for instruction, the student would actually listen and learn instead of rushing to take notes. To keep these students 100% engaged, I would provide them a highlighter to mark important concepts.
3. Share videos with students to watch with captions (or to rewatch)
We love our diverse student video library! Teachers have used these videos in a variety of ways, but this is probably the simplest. The student videos can be used to preview the material before class or review the material after class. In addition, you can add live captioning on Google Chrome by following these instructions. It is super easy (requires about 3 steps!) and is available in multiple languages. For students who benefit from hearing and reading information at the same time, this can be a game changer!
4. Provide extra work space (print teaching slides with 6 slides per page)
Adequate work space is vital to student success. However, student handwriting varies and we don’t want to waste paper! For students who can benefit from the extra space, the teaching slides provide just that! All you have to do is open up the teaching slides, go to File > Print. Select “More settings” and choose 4 or more “Pages per sheet.”
5. Reduce the number of answer choices on the Unit Tests
Our unit tests are editable! This means you can alter test questions, remove extra information, shorten the assessment – whatever your students need. An accommodation that I think is a low-lift for teachers, but a big help for students is removing an answer choice. It is a subtle way to give extra time/shorten an assignment without actually doing so. This provides support especially with problems that require you to test every answer choice.
6. Add audio (text to speech) to Google Forms Assessments
All of our assessments include a Google Form version. This makes grading easier, but it also provides students the opportunity to listen to the test questions too. Using the Chrome extension, Mote, teachers can simply turn on the “Text-to-speech” setting. Full disclosure: I would recommend previewing the assessment’s text-to-speech before assigning it to students. Because the extension cannot read images, you will likely need to supplement and read a few questions or images aloud.
How do you accommodate using Maneuvering the Middle’s All Access?
