Instructional and Environmental Strategies for All Learners - Challenges with Organization (Updated July 2020)
Challenges with Organization
- Create and teach routines and procedures.
- Provide teacher demonstration & modeling, guided, independent practice, and frequent review opportunities.
- Use checklists and mnemonics to help students remember the expected behaviors.
- Color code notebooks and school book covers.
- Have students "check" unneeded books and notebooks at the door. They can pick up their items as they exit class.
- Attach things that often get misplaced (pencils) to students' desks with Velcro.
- Use assignment books and calendars.
- Check that homework assignments are written down daily.
- Provide a copy of assignments for home.
- Check homework daily.
- Send daily/weekly progress reports home.
- Provide a time weekly for organizing desk and notebooks.
- Assign a peer buddy to assist with organization.
- Create backwards timelines for larger projects.
- Help students estimate how long it will take them to complete each portion of a project.
- Provide an outline of the text.
- Color-code to identify vocabulary, main ideas.
- Teach students to identify and highlight key information.
- Use slot outlines.
- Teach note-taking skills.
- Provide page numbers where answers can be found.
- Provide advanced organizers.
- Allow student to use a computer to complete assignments.
- Use graph paper to help students organize calculation problems, or turn notebook paper horizontally. Provide boxes for students to write in answers.
- Avoid cluttered/crowded worksheets.
- Teach goal-setting skills.
- Teach decision-making/prioritizing skills.
- Teach time-management skills.
Additional Links and Resources:
- Wisconsin Assistive Technology Initiative Assistive Technology
- Math Learning Disabilities (LD Online)
- Consequences, Characteristics, and Causes of Mathematical Learning Disabilities and Persistent Low Achievement in Mathematics (National Center for Biotechnology Information, NCBI)
- What is Dyscalculia? (Attitude: Inside the ADHD mind)
- Intensive Intervention (National Center on Intensive Intervention, NCII)
- Virginia’s Guidelines for Education Students with Specific Learning Disabilities (Math strategies are available starting on page 23.)
- The Concrete-Representational-Abstract Approach for Mathematics Instruction (CRA)
- Page 3: Evidence-Based Mathematics Practices (IRIS Center) The Iris Center is a great resource for evidence-based math strategies for students with mathematics difficulties, such as schema instruction, explicit instruction, and using multiple representations.