Modifying Curriculum For The Special Needs Student

Have you ever had to use a district curriculum that doesn’t really fit the levels or needs of your special needs student? It can be hard to make a purchased program work for our students, but it IS possible!

To do so, though, we need to be flexible and creative….We totally rock flexible and creative, right?!

Here is an example of how to modify & adapt a social studies program designed for regular first graders. All of my students are special education students with severe delays, but they still need to learn this information and they need a way to demonstrate what they have learned.

Here is the text book my students are using:

We work on reading, listening and following along in text books during small group time. Before closing the book, we also work on labeling and finding pictures, actions, text features such as title, bold text, illustrations, etc.

Many of my students are non-writers and have limited drawing skills. Without modifications my students would feel like failures and act out when I gave them this worksheet (above). To help them be successful we took the writing/drawing component out of it.

Here is an example of one of the outcomes…they all varied depending on the type and amount of adaptions specific students needed.

Let’s all learn from each other…post and idea for modification in the comments!