Help with lesson for special ed

Hi,
Does anyone have any ideas on 2 lessons I can do with my kids on persuasion. My kids are 6,7,8 grade and most of them have mild mental retardation. I am being observed this week and everything I have tried, they are not grasping, so I don't want to do the lesson I had planned, because they still don't understand what it means to persuade. I have tried using commercials and ads, most of them have dogs so I used pics of a dog begging for food at the dinner table (how does your dog persuade you to give him your food), I have used them wanting to go outside on the playground for lunch and how could they get the lunch person to say yes. All of these things relate to their personal lives, but they are not understanding persuasion and when I give them classwork, they are unable to do it. Please, I would really appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks,
Jenn

Re: Help with lesson for special ed

It seems like you already came up with really good ideas, I'm sorry they didn't work!

I'm a special ed teacher so hopefully I can help you come up with something. Are they able to read? Maybe you can try role playing. Make skits of one person persuading another. It can just be something really simple, given their ability level, to get the point across. That way they can really see it. (If your class is made up of non-readers then perhaps YOU could act it out with another staff member.)

As for the next part of the lesson to make sure they understood it, you can break them up into pairs (make the students in pairs, ones that are on comparable levels). In each pair of students, assign each of them numbers- 1 and 2.
Give each of the person you assigned as 1 their own card. The card might say something like ... "persuade person 2 to give you candy" (make the difficulty of what's on the card depend on their ability level (that takes care of your differentiated instruction which the administrators will probably like to see) So like, a higher level group might have a card that says "persuade person 2 to do your homework for you"
Tell them that to act it out, they have to model what you had shown them.

To make it extra fun, wrap up 2 prizes and tell them that the team who does the best acting will get the wrapped prizes!
Get them enthusiastic about it! Tell them you really want to see how well they can act It could actually be a really fun activity!



I won't feel bad if you think this idea $ucks but if you do try it, or modify it, I am interested in hearing about how it goes!

GOOD LUCK!

Message edited 5/9/2009 10:39:00 PM.