Continuity of Learning During COVID-19 Resource Database

This resource includes instructions and tips for families on how to create a calm down area at home.

The current pandemic has resulted in the need for educators and service providers to find ways to deliver services remotely; yet students and communities have unequal access to internet and technology resources. This resource helps practitioners make decisions about the most appropriate method for distant delivery and has organized resources and indicated the level of technology necessary to use them when providing instruction and services for transition-age students with disabilities.

The Unified Young readers Club is a great inclusive activity for a younger audience and accompanies Special Olympics Young Athletes play with books and study guides that support teachers as they address such topics as inclusion, awareness, friendship, bullying, and acceptance to audiences of both students with and without intellectual disabilities. Each book has a theme that relates to multiple state academic standards, and aligns with the precepts of positive school climate initiatives.

This lesson, featuring Karen McWilliams, a 504 Coordinator and Dyslexia Teacher in Rochelle ISD in Texas, supports educators in using technology to teach foundational reading skills to students in elementary grades using a variety of facilitated activities to support phonemic awareness, phoneme–grapheme correspondence, irregular and high-frequency words, writing, and connected text. The collection, adapted from content developed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute, includes a tip sheet, a video examples, and slides illustrating the lesson.

In this lesson Carla Jo Whatley, a First Grade Teacher at Ferris Intermediate in Ferris ISD in Texas, illustrates how to use virtual manipulatives within a math lesson synchronously or asynchronously. The collection includes a tip sheet, two video examples, and slides with virtual base ten block practice examples.

Practice guides for teleteaching for educators and families. English and Spanish translations of behavior, low intensity strategies, and overall guidance for engaging with children with disabilities in virtual learning spaces

These videos illustrate how parents and grandparents can implement the NCII reading and mathematics sample lessons to provide additional practice opportunities. In addition to the video examples, a tip sheet is available to help parents implement the lessons.

This video and tip sheets provide an example and strategies for how educators can implement the NCII reading and mathematics sample lessons through virtual learning. The video illustrates a sample lesson using explicit instruction principles being delivered by an educator virtually and the tip sheets provide considerations for educators delivering instruction and how they can collaborate with families to provide additional practice opportunities using the sample lessons.

This resource was developed by a coalition of projects that are funded by the Office of Special Education Programs in response to requests from state and local educational agencies and parents about how to hold and participate in virtual individualized education program (IEP) meetings. While intended to meet a need during the COVID-19 pandemic, the content is designed to have broader applications.

This Voices From the Field piece includes a discussion with Laura Hamby and Ann Jolly from the Exceptional Children department in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools about how they have addressed teaching and learning challenges related to COVID-19 restrictions. They shared some of the strategies they implemented during Spring 2020 to support special educators in their districts to meet the needs of students with disabilities and their families.

NCSI presented a multi-part webinar series sharing best practices for state special education leaders to make the best use of available resources during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. NCSI and invited experts shared information to help state leadership teams make informed decisions amid current circumstances, ensuring leaders are poised to continue high-quality educational programming for students and families.

In this webinar, Susan Barrett highlights the challenges presented by the current context and emphasizes the importance of supporting the social and emotional needs of all. She shares specific suggestions for supporting students, promoting staff wellness, and compassionately navigating the current context.

Progress monitoring allows educators and administrators to understand whether students are responding to intervention and if adaptations are needed. This FAQ collection includes considerations for data collection and analysis for schools to consider as they rethink their progress monitoring approach due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Guidance from vendors on the academic and behavior progress monitoring tools charts are included.

This webinar highlights critical practices to create positive, predictable, and safe learning environments for all students.

This lessons includes a tip sheet, slides with activities, and supplemental materials that are associated with finding the area of various polygons, the area of circles, and the relationship between the area formulas, as well as a final activity exploring the area of a parallelogram and the area of a circle. This unit was created by Robert Stroud from Westerly Public Schools in Rhode Island to support making the connections between various polygons and their areas rather than just providing formulas to compute.