Last Updated on October 9, 2023 by Editorial Team
Dyscalculia, a learning difficulty related to numbers, impacts various daily life activities. Children find it difficult to tell time, manage money, or make decisions. Since the inability to do daily life math-based tasks clouds over other skills, this learning deficiency needs correct and ample addressing.
To provide equal chances at learning, educational institutes run individualized education programs. These programs are designed in a diagnostic and prescriptive manner to help children become skillful in an age-appropriate manner. Let’s take up Telling Time IEP Goals in this post.
Time Telling IEP Goals: Overcoming difficulties systematically
IDEA Act of 1997 mandated providing suitable interventions at schools to help children with learning difficulties. It is needed to bring quality output on one hand and to reduce dropouts leading to lots of social-cognitive issues later on the other. The emergence of dialogue, the use of scientifically proven methods, and the designing of a curriculum student-centric way were some of the drivers that led to the implementation of individualized education programs.
Assistive technology provided the right tools and counseling helped people condone their deficiencies. Learning should never take a backseat; it is perhaps the idea behind all these developments leading to the designing IEP goals for all skills including time telling. Let’s take a quick look at the IEP goals to teach telling time.
List of Telling Time IEP Goals
IEP goals or individualized education program comprises diagnosing the root cause of failures in assessments followed by working on those in a direct and systematic manner. It is designed keeping characteristics like specificity, measurability, attainability, result-promoting, and time-boundedness in mind.
For every child with special learning needs, a big skill is broken into smaller learnable. A statement is coined for assessing the progress, that typically goes like this, “Susan (student) will learn to tell time by 1 min difference (skill) with 85% proficiency(performance level) by the end of 3 months.”
(Extracted from Virginia Department of Education and other sources), telling time IEP goals bank comprises the following learning goals:
A student, using a digital or analog clock, with 100% accuracy about 80% of the time, will:
- Tell time to an interval of five minutes
- Tell time indicating 1-minute difference
- Tell time to one hour difference
- Add and subtract two given times
- Understand the meaning of half past, quarter past, quarter to and similar terms
- Calculate how much time passed between two activities performed in daily life
These goals are checked for the level of attainment at the end of the review period and ensuing actionable are suggested. It is very important to be discrete and unbiased while sharing performance reports. The focus should be on normalizing the environment of discussion so that parents, children, and teachers can participate without inhibitions guilt, or negative emotions of any kind.
Deciding and implementing IEP goals: Correct approach
IEP goals can be broken down into what (skill), when (review period), how (learning method), and where (learning environment or special conditions). This statement hints at doing a few important assessments to ensure successful implementation. For instance:
- Identification of present level of proficiency: Understand what assessment test to give to define the need. Make a note of the areas where the child shows deficiency.
- Employing the relevant teaching method: The approach of teaching has to be child-centric. The term ‘Individualized’ holds true only when the teaching method is molded to fit the child’s understanding. Forcing a child to adapt to an existing method is not the correct approach.
- Designing environment: Making a choice among group teaching (classroom environment), one-on-one tutoring, homeschooling, etc.
- Giving a suitable period for learning and practicing skills: A review period depending upon the extent of deficiency is to be decided. The review period cannot be too long or too short.
All these considerations help adopt a structured approach for implementing IEPs in a performance-oriented manner.
Making IEP a success
Implementation of IEP can help derive benefits when a systematic approach is in place. Teachers, parents, school authorities, and reviewers have to come together and ‘be there’ to make IEP a success. Apart from teamwork, other important drivers of success are:
- Information exchange: With well-coordinated communication, active participation in discussion by parents and teachers, and zeal to find ways to make learning easier can improve IEP results. Parents must provide details of activities at home, and get the progress analysis of class participation done too.
- Monitoring: Schools must have a monitoring authority in place that ensures that IEP is implemented as per the plan. The authorities must monitor if the equipment, process, and intervention methods are updated and that the correct procedures are in place.
- Review and Revision: Gauging outcomes is necessary to undermine overall meaning. If the child is making faster progress or is slow at it, there have to be timely assessments and reviews of the same. In case of faster progress, moving the child to a higher level can save undue exploitation of resources and the remnant academic year can be employed for proficiency-relevant topics. Similarly, slow progress may need a change of pace or style of intervention to provide suitable help.
- Knowledge of legalities: Parents may exercise their right to complain about the school’s failure when they know the arrangements the child is entitled to. Hence, it is necessary for schools to make the program transparent so that positive interactions only emerge.
The ultimate beneficiary of IEP programs is a child. Hence, if the program is followed in a disciplined manner and with the correct approach, it may strengthen the child to experience a smooth transition into adult life. It is where the actual motive of IEP lies.
Conclusion
Apart from being a math skill, telling time is a matter of cognition too. Children can understand the concept of fast and slow, and allot suitable time to various activities when they know how to tell time and do related calculations. IEP programs serve the dual need to learn reading clocks and manage time.
While understanding hours and minutes suffices knowledge needs, time management offers a premise to apply this skill in daily life. Hence, be clear and honest about IEP needs instead of simply passing those off as a formality.
I am Pratiksha Bhatt, Bachelor of Life Science, and Masters in Management Studies. I have done certification courses in early education counseling. I am a writer, a mother of a child with spelling difficulties which drove me to alternative resources of education like manipulatives and participatory activities. My areas of expertise are learning difficulties, alternative learning methods, and activity-based learning.