SPED Summer Bloghop! Week 1: Scheduling

I’m so excited to be hooking up with a bunch of SPED teachers to share our experiences working in the Special Education classroom.  This week, we’re sharing information about scheduling in the Special Education Classroom.

Oh man, scheduling.  This can make or break your Special Education program and it’s ALWAYS changing in my classroom.  I have a basic routine I follow each year as I develop my class schedule.  I always use Excel to build my class schedule and make each day on a different page in my spreadsheet.

The first thing I do is a make a basic schedule for my class with the students names across the top row and then I break down the time increments based on our center rotations (20 minutes this year).  It looks something like this.

Then I go back and plug in the times of things I have no control over (recess, lunch, PE, etc.).  It looks something like this.

Now is when it gets tricky!  I make sure that I check in with my OT and Speech teacher’s ASAP when school starts.  I want to get them into my schedule and build in the rest of my student’s days.

I schedule my IAs lunches during our speech blocks.  This way my Speech teacher is able to take a group, I have a group, and I still have another IA to run a group.

Now, I need to figure out what centers I need my students to participate in.  I want each my students to have at lease 2 DT sessions, an independent work station, a language center, reading, writing, math, and a break center.  Beyond that, I just move things around until all students needs are being met within the schedule.

**This is a mock schedule**

From here I am easily able to determine my IA’s schedules.  I have already planned their lunches and I have assigned them to student tasks.  I go through the schedule one more time and make sure it makes sense for the people who will be running centers (IA’s stay in 1 center for a while or are in nearby centers).  I draft up a schedule for my IAs to reference and I post it in our classroom.

In the end, I usually end up with a slightly different schedule for each day because of speech and OT push ins happening at different frequencies for different students and different specials on different days (we have PE prep twice a week and no other specials).  It’s just easier for me to have a schedule for each day.

How do you set up your schedule?

Make sure you stay tuned.  Each week we’ll be bringing you more information about how we structure our classrooms!

Now hop on over to Autism Classroom News to see what Christine has to share!