Special Ed Exams - Frosted Christmas Trees

So last week was exam week at school and I had a lot of people ask me on how I give exams to my students (I was also asking the other teachers in our program trying to figure out the same question!) Even though we are a multi-needs special education program, we are still in a regular high school, so we still do things like exams...

The answer for how to do exams - rubrics. I didn't have all my student sit at their desks with a pencil and pages of a test - that wouldn't truly assess the abilities of my students. Instead I had my students complete a project and I would mark how well they performed on various activities.

For Language Arts, I had the students make a Christmas card. I used a rubric to asses if they chose an appropriate greeting, if sentences started with capital letters, if sentences ended with periods, if they used an appropriate closing, and if they signed their first and last name.

For Math, I took each student aside individually (while the rest of the students were working on a Christmas activity with a paraprofessional in the room) and assessed (with a rubric again) their ability to count bills, count change, pay for items with the dollar over method, calculate change back with a calculator, know which item costs less, ect.

For my Resource Class I had some fun. I have such a wide range of abilities in this class and I wanted to make sure that each student felt like they could be successful and also enjoy the activity. One of the other teachers found this recipe, and we used it to make Christmas trees out of ice cream cones!

Here's what we needed:

• cone shaped ice cream cones
• white frosting + green food coloring
• m&ms
• sprinkles
• gum drops

Here I assessed students on following directions, such as putting the cone upside down, putting frosting on cone (or telling someone where to put the frosting), putting on 5 M&Ms, ect. They were so proud of their creations! And thought they tasted pretty good too...

I love my job! :) Seriously, how can you NOT have fun doing things like this! :)