Last Updated on October 4, 2022 by Editorial Team
It’s hard for a child with learning disorders to match the performance of a regular child. They can’t just study the same curriculum given to the abled kids and if they can, they require a little extra effort than their counterparts. Thus in order to make developmental, behavioral, and social skills better for the differently-abled students, the Individualized Education Program, commonly known as IEP, is rising as an effective tool.
IEP creates a blueprint of the student’s current development, the goals he or she has to achieve, and the way to get there.
Geometry can be challenging for many individuals. Special students, especially with learning disorders like dyslexia, need a special method to learn it. Students suffering from dyslexia face difficulty while naming similar-looking letters like p and q, but they don’t have a visual defect. So the IEP program helps us understand particular problems that the child is facing while learning.
IEP goals are to be set for the student at different intervals of time to make them understand better and give them self-confidence that they too can learn, just the method that they need to understand the things are a little different from others. Here we are going to tell you about the important goals of IEP. Here are some of the measurable IEP geometry goals for students to follow.
Measurable IEP goals for learning geometry
1. Identify and describe shapes
Identification of various shapes like a rhombus, cylinder, sphere, triangles, quadrilaterals is very important for any further study in geometry. Because geometry is all about the study of different shapes.
Use 3-D structures for making the understanding better. It will fit in the brain more than a 2-D structure on paper.
After learning about the shapes, Mark the difference between various shapes that look similar, like cuboid and rhombus or ellipse and sphere. It will make the identification of the shapes easier when all the shapes are presented to the student together.
2. Puzzle-solving
Solving different puzzles increases the sharpness of the mind. It helps the child to overcome his or her inability to fit manipulatives together.
Make them start with fewer pieces of puzzles (15-20) and gradually increase the numbers of pieces.
Take this to a next level by making the child solve a jigsaw puzzle and when the child can do it easily replace the jigsaw puzzle with lego pieces and let them make a variety of lego sets.
It will help them immensely in practical life to connect their thoughts and let them think in one direction without getting perplexed.
3. Practice making 3-D
Just identifying the ready-made things helps any student to an extent, but making it practically is a huge difference from just identification. Let the student make various geometrical shapes on their own with the help of clay, they might not do it perfectly the first time itself, but gradually with a practice that will improve. It might take them longer than you thought it would, but you need to be patient with them, one single comment from your side is enough to shatter their confidence to pieces.
4. Practice on paper
When they will dive into the real world, clay will not be available to them to make other people understand geometry, they will only be provided with a pen and paper so they have to be ready for it.
Start by making them draw shapes on a canvas sized paper that has small boxes in it, the boxes are important at first because that will tell them exactly where to fill the ink on the paper. Draw points in the boxes that they have to fill and let them connect the points, let them draw on full-sized paper first, and then gradually decrease the number of boxes that they can use to draw or write a letter or number.
Finally, remove the boxes and make them draw or write on a plain piece of paper.
5. Learning geometric terms
Now comes a bit harder part of geometry, the terms that are used in geometry should be explained to the students by demonstrating the terms in graphic forms. Like the term, the angle should be taught to them by showing them angles in the things that we use in day-to-day life. Different geometrical terms like size, angle, face, vertex, point, line, line segment, ray need different types of demonstration
6. Calculative geometry
It is the most important thing after the student learns all the basics of geometry. Calculating the area, volume, surface area are needed the most in real life so the student must learn it and understand it properly. The impact of calculating geometry is seen in multiple professions like an architect, mechanical engineering, surveyor, cartographer, and many others.
Even if the child doesn’t wish to pursue a career involving geometry, calculating geometry can still be useful in everyday activities like sports, quilting, food decoration,n, etc.
Wrapping up,
The IEP goals set up are exclusive for every child and it includes everything about the child, like what problem he or she is facing in the current curriculum, and how can he or she overcome it. The goals of the student must be updated regularly as and when needed. They should be given short-term goals also so that they don’t lose their confidence and little wins keep them motivated to reach the final goals.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,