Below you will find an A-Z list of accommodations and modifications that I used for my students. This is was created specifically for my teaching practice when I was working with students where English was their second language. However, I have found that most, if not all, will translate with amazing results to various special needs and general teaching practices. I think its best to add to our tools and try things on the list before we say our kids are having trouble learning something.
Alternative Assessments: Using checklists, rubrics, cloze, portfolios, retellings and journals provide many views of skills for continuous monitoring and support.
Brainstorming: Recording all discussion on a topic helps develop key ideas, vocabulary and background knowledge
Context Clues: Teaching how to use context in the passage helps define unfamiliar vocabulary and infer meaning.
Demonstrating: Direct teaching by displaying visuals and demonstrating behaviors helps clarify routines and language.
Engaging Interaction: Think-Pair-Share, class meetings, quick draws, chants, gestures or word walls help develop fluent language.
Frontloading: Pre-teaching test-specific vocabulary and concepts builds background knowledge and increases fluency.
Graphic Organizers: Help provide a framework for students to organize information and use language meaningfully.
Highlighting in Colors: Writing directions or text in different colors clarifies steps and key ideas to focus attention and develop study skills.
Incorporating Student Native Language(s): Referencing or including accessibility to the students’ native language(s) helps them make linguistic connections and confidence.
Jig-Saw Techniques: Diving text into sections for small groups to read and become “experts” allows them to access information with peer support and teach each other.
Knowing Students: Understanding students and the types of schooling that appeals to them helps them learn!
Linguistic Clues: Using familiar roots to decode difficult words helps students expand vocabulary and access academic language.
Modeling: Role play, listening centers, corrective feedback, group work and visual cues model academic and social language.
Note Taking: Modeling taking notes as you read or KWL charts helps students organize and store information to reinforce comprehension.
Outlining: Listing sequential turning points in stories provides a framework that teaches students to preview and predict.
Paraphrasing: Changing an author’s words into your own helps students understand how they need to translate meaning and process events in text.
Questioning Strategies: Showing the process of wondering and confirming predictions or inferences helps ELLs think, monitor, question and evaluate.
Realia: Including a great deal of realia (real objects) and visuals helps develop students’ understanding of the English language.
Social Interaction: Providing time for play, hands-on-learning, and ice breakers, first as partners and then in small groups, helps students to be active constructors of language.
Thinking Aloud: Talking aloud calmly, clearly and slowly as you read, perform, and think through an activity helps students become independent learners.
Universal Symbols: Teaching students to recognize universal symbols to communicate essential information about services, safety, or travel helps them navigate the world.
Visualizing: Making “mental images” motivates students to draw conclusions, create unique interpretations, clarify, use rich detail, and revise images to use new information.
Wait Time: Pausing regularly while reading aloud or during oral presentations helps students absorb information and respond.
Experimentations: Using and Experimenting with language through peer conferences and editing during writing workshop helps students discover options as language users.
Yells, Chants, Rhymes, Songs and Poems: Repeating lyrics helps students experience and practice language in an effective way.
Zone of Proximal Development: Scaffolding with a rich literate environment such as predictable, patterned print, culturally rich books read aloud often, dictation, and teaching writing processes strtches students toward independence.