Curricular Modification
In order to design a modified curriculum, combinations of varying levels of content and objective modifications should selected based on the individual student’s needs. Teachers should be aware of the following ideas: (a) the students’ unique differences should be valued, (b) not all students need to be doing the same thing at the same time, (c) team members or teachers contribute uniquely to the planning and implementation of the process, and (d) all students should belong in the age appropriate general education class. Teachers should also understand students’ IEPs, to plan in advance, expand their knowledge of curriculum, and collaborate with other teachers.
Modifying materials
You can create a lesson so that the child can participate as independently as possible. The student with SID will be given the same content but the way student with SID completes an activity may be different than that of other students. A way to modify materials includes:
1) Process Charts with Visual Reminders- For the scientific method, instead of just having a child read about it from a text book, a teacher can post the sequence of the method (with explanations) some where in the classroom so the student is not overloaded with words in a text. This will allow the student with SID to move to a certain place in the classroom away from distractions and work at his/her own pace to complete a scientific method assignment.
2) Simplifying a complicated task by breaking it into smaller parts or reducing the number of steps- For example, during a task that calls for a student to do numerous tosses with a penny to explore probability, a modification would be to reduce the amount of tosses that the student with SID has to do. This will still allow students to do the activity and have a better chance at completing the activity.
An actual modification used in my classroom for my student with Sensory Integration Disorder by my Mentor Teacher and I was during a writing assignment, which required the student to write a story based on a story they read in their Journey's a Reading textbook. The student did not show interest in this activity and the amount of text that he had to read to then create his own story proved to be too much for him. He began to bother other students and get out of his seat. As a result of this, my MT and I realized that the student liked the Ripley's Believe It or Not book that we had in our class. Instead of having the student read the text from the Journey's textbook, we allowed the student to read about the phenomenons in the Ripley's Book for the conventional writing assignment. This allowed the student to read the objective we set out for the class in a modified way.