If you have students with significant physical, medical, or academic needs in your classroom, it is often easy to overlook the basics of education in favor of the things that are functional. This isn’t a bad thing! In fact, I would say that 60-70% of your instruction in a significant needs setting SHOULD be on functional academics, regardless of the age of your students.

–HOWEVER–

Just because you are in a functional needs class, does not mean that you can skip basic academics.  In fact, many functional skills can not be completed without them! But if you have a student that has difficulty moving their arms or fingers, gives answers using Eye Gaze or is not a good fit for regular normed assessment, how are you supposed to gauge what they do or don’t already know!?

I know that I struggled with this for a long time.  I would get new students that used wheelchairs, or only communicated with icons and simply try to teach my functional curriculum or the district curriculum (Unique) without actually knowing if they even knew their basic skills such as numbers, colors, letters, etc! And as far as I knew, there wasn’t a good assessment available for these kiddos.  We had the Brigance and the WIAT available and both required students to either be able to talk or to receptively identify/point to the correct response on TINY little booklets.  Definitely not a functional way to assess learning for all of our kiddos!

So if you can’t find what you need, what do teachers do? You make your own!
I actually made the original version in my Pre-TPT days using Microsoft Word.  Junk? Maybe, but it worked! In fact, some of my pages of my official copy I use (colors, letters etc) are still from the original! If it ain’t broke…..

So how would you go about using these assessments functionally in your classroom?

My first recommendation is to ASSESS TO YOUR STUDENT!
The best part of these is that they AREN’T normed or scaled or blah blah blah.  While those can be great references for some students, our families usually already KNOW that their child is behind grade level.  Giving them this information again isn’t usually helpful.  This also means you can Test your kiddos how you know they will best tell you what they know.  For some students, I can put 2 – 4 icons on a felt board and let them use their hands to make a choice to the prompt e.g. “Where is the number 3?” for students using eye gaze only, I can hold the two icons on either side of their vision and give the prompt and wait for them to look at the response.  If a student has a 30 second wait time, be sure to USE IT!  If a student is only good at answering Yes/No questions, you can give questions one at a time as a Yes or No response, “Is this the letter B? Yes or No?”

Next: TAKE DATA AND REPORT IT OUT!
The data sheets included are intuitive and simple, but if you don’t know how to interpret them, then they are just data sheets.  So here are some tips for taking the data and how to report it out.   When taking the data during an assessment session, make sure that you are familiar and comfortable with the abbreviations/notations, or use what works for you.  A student getting a question right with partial physical prompting is VASTLY different than a student getting it right independently and unprompted.  Also be sure note wait times and number of times you had to repeat the prompt.   Secondly you will want to note trends in your data.  Does the student know their numbers but need help with Letters? Can you see that they get all of their consonants but miss their vowels? Did you even know that they knew all of those shapes?!
When you report this data, try to keep a strengths based approach.  Like I mentioned before, parents are often told time and time again by assessment after assessment that their child is “Below Average” or “Below Grade Level”.  How discouraging!   Instead of saying “Jaime doesn’t know his numbers or shapes.” you can say “Jaime is making progress on identifying letters, he has receptively ID’d 20/26 letters and is working on his shapes and numbers!”  Doesn’t that sound a bit more positive? And it gives the same information!

There are endless options and opportunities to allow students to demonstrate knowledge!  I am constantly shocked by my students.  Students who we thought could only answer Yes/No are accurately ID’ing ALL their shapes!  Students who can barely move their arms or legs are moving their eyes and telling me they KNOW IT! And telling their parents how much their child actually knows is just half the fun!

If you need to assess for highly specific things, feel free to make your own! But you don’t need to reinvent the wheel here! I have a Basic Academic Assessment with Level 2 coming in June, as well as 2 Levels of My Math Assessment already ready for you! Just laminate, velcro, and store in a binder and you will have these for YEARS!

Do you use eye gaze or icon assessments with your kids?  What was something you learned that shocked you?  Let me know in the comments!