Planning for Individualizing My Program for Each Student

Here's a new thing I decided to do when planning for this year. Since I have students with such a wide range of abilities, I really want to individualize as much as possible. Duh, obviously! That's the goal, right? But I decided to approach thinking about it differently than I have before: I thought out and wrote up an IDEAL day for each student. What would they work on in the areas of self-help skills, vocational skills, academic skills? What gross and fine motor activities would they engage in? What sensory activities would they do? What are their preferred activities that I want to make sure they get to do when they are finished working?

I wrote their IEP goals in red because those are the things I for sure need to get to. The black ink is things that would be awesome for them to have exposure to. The IDEAL scenario.

So now, as I look at these charts for each of my 9 students, I can decide how I want to schedule our day. Can I incorporate all of the academic skills into circle time, or should I include them into centers as well? Can they be incorporated into some independent task box time that will also address vocational needs? Should I include sensory play in centers or should it be its own time? Should we play in the therapy gym every day or just on certain days? These are the kinds of questions that I feel I can answer better now that I've considered what an ideal day would look like for each of my students.

What do you think? How do you decide what types of activities to include in your daily or weekly schedule?

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