Blog Post Listing

New year, new focus! As school is back in session after the holidays and the second half of the school year begins, many students struggle to stay focused. Previously we addressed the importance of routines throughout the holiday break, but maintaining that stability is not always realistic; and as special educators, we know all too well how difficult it is to re-establish routine after an interruption.

While concentration is a challenge this time of year, special education teachers understand their students’ needs –and our team works with them to find ways our curriculum can help their students stay on track.

At Healthy Relationships Curriculum, we understand that learning needs to be interactive for students to remain focused in school. Our curriculum incorporates activities and videos designed by our team of educators and counselors to ensure that lessons are taught in a fun way to help keep students motivated.

HRC offers extra support for teachers as well! Planning enjoyable lessons for students can be a time-consuming process. Recognizing this challenge, we provide consultations and development opportunities for our teachers, allowing them to support their students in their growth, both inside and outside the classroom.

If you want to help your students succeed and learn more about our Healthy Relationships Curriculum watch this overview video and request a free demo!

December 10th marks the 75^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines the rights entitled to all human beings regardless of race, color, religion, sex, birth, ability, status, property or national origin into international agreement. The landmark global pledge was signed on December 10, 1948, in Paris and has been responsible for the creation of over 70 other human rights treaties since then.

The theme for this year’s anniversary is “Dignity, Freedom and Justice for All,” with an emphasis on vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities, to ensure no one is left behind.

As a former special education teacher and supervisor, I can say that a big part of what makes this day special is education; specifically equal access to high-quality special education that supports both students and educators and ensures everyone can to excel. The Healthy Relationships Curriculum is one of those opportunities – when students are presented with unique, easily modified lessons fit for any classroom, learning multiplies tenfold.

HRC offers students and educators the support they need through individualized, comprehensive programming such as:

• Over 80 Scenario Cards: These scenario cards turn the lessons into real-life situations to help students better understand them.
• Fun activities and videos for parents to help students with various abilities.
• Role Plays, Demonstrations, and Life-Skills Activities: The best way to teach life skills is by having students use them. Our role-playing demonstrations allow students to practice the skills they learned during their lessons.

Everyone deserves equal access to quality education fit for them. If you are looking for more ways to make your lessons engaging and less time consuming when teaching students of various abilities, I highly encourage you to request a free trial of the program or schedule a consultation with our team to discuss the curriculum.

Having trouble with finding the best way to adapt your lessons for your unique classroom? Worry no more! With our Healthy Relationships Curriculum (HRC), you can teach with confidence. Our program not only has built-in lessons and learning materials, but we also provide ongoing support for educators. That means that whenever you need additional guidance or advice on how to implement our Healthy Relationships lessons, you can count on our team for help. This program is not just a “buy and download” situation; we are happy to offer professional guidance to help you conquer any challenges you may face as an educator while using Healthy Relationships.

In addition to ongoing support, our HRC team provides comprehensive training on the program to get educators acquainted with the material. That way, there is no need to feel unprepared to share the lessons with your students. To reinforce the material that you teach, we provide home supplements and a parent guide for success so that students can practice what they’ve learned at home. Interested in what some of the lessons and materials look like? Schedule a video presentation with our team and start a free trial of HRC to find out how much the program will benefit you and your students.

According to the PACER Center, children and teenagers with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be bullied than their peers. Bullying can affect a student’s self-esteem, confidence, social life, relationships, mental health, and overall well-being. As a special education teacher with over 20 years of classroom experience, October holds a special place in my heart as Bullying Prevention Month.

Students deserve to feel confident and empowered both in and out of the classroom regardless of their abilities, which is exactly where our Healthy Relationships Curriculum can help teach students to feel more confident in who they are at the same time.

We understand that special education and life skills transcend what one might think of when it comes to traditional education. Healthy Relationships covers topics like hygiene, dating, using social media safely, privacy, and even the differences between friends, acquaintances, and bullies. Healthy Relationships is built around understanding the importance of using visuals and alternate means of learning, which is why it includes nearly 200 demonstration & role-play videos, over 60 scenario cards to help students practice real-life skills, and fun, interactive role-playing games to act out the lessons.

The overall purpose of special education is to teach students the critical life skills they need to succeed. For special educators, sometimes this can be a heavy lift, especially when teaching students with various needs. Luckily, this program not only has learning tools, but also built-in supports from other special educators ready to help you tackle many of the challenges you may face.

Some tools and features of the program include:

• Role Plays, Demonstrations, and Life-Skills Activity demonstrations allow students to practice the skills they learned during their lessons through real-life scenarios.
• Visuals to help teach complex topics.
• Online Progress Monitoring Tools to consistently measure, assess and compare skill levels.

In all my years in education, I’ve never encountered a program designed to support students and educators at the same time, but Healthy Relationships makes it possible and so much less stressful when it comes to finding the right curriculum for your students. Please review our sample lessons and request a free demonstration of the Healthy Relationships to learn more about how this program could benefit your students.

Author: Jen Falkowski, MEd — Supervisor of Special Education

 

Special Education teachers understand that students with various abilities face challenges when developing social skills. They know that these students need extra support to build these skills, understand why they are essential, and effectively use them daily. Often, special education teachers need additional support to find methods to teach these skills. That’s where our Healthy Relationships Curriculum can help.

Unlike other curriculums, our program was designed by special educators for special educators who know what you need to help your students succeed. They have worked together to create a curriculum that provides all the resources and tools you will need to help teach your students with varying abilities. Our program offers lessons on all aspects of social skills, from dating, maintaining personal space, and even hygiene and cleanliness.

We believe students learn best when they are having fun. No student wants to sit and listen to a teacher’s lecture all the time. After all, the best way to teach social skills is to have students learn them in a social setting. Our Healthy Relationships Curriculum uses fun, interactive methods to teach students social skills they can use in everyday life.

Our teaching methods vary, so students participate in new learning activities often. We have created nearly 200 videos to show students how to develop and strengthen their social skills. Our Curriculum also features role-playing scenarios, scenario cards, and opportunities to practice skills outside the classroom so students perform these skills in real-world situations.

I feel very passionately about Healthy Relationships. I believe it is the best resource available for special education teachers to properly teach critical social and life skills to students. I’m sure you will too. That’s why I encourage you to look at our welcome video, which will show what is involved in our curriculum, and schedule a free demonstration with me to learn more about the Healthy Relationships Curriculum.

Author: Melissa Ringold, MEd — Curriculum/Instruction Coach

Happy Summer Vacation! Between enjoying the lovely, long days and spending time with family and friends, many teachers of students with various needs take a well-deserved break. That’s because they spend a great deal of time preparing for what to teach their students year after year. This can lead to hours of researching online for new teaching methods or spending your summer collecting materials and reviewing data. After all this, you still may not find the correct information or not enough activities and lessons to teach your students.

Our Healthy Relationships Curriculum can help special educators spend their summer days enjoying the weather instead of being stuck researching at a computer and help them feel assured their students will receive the information they need to succeed next school year.

With Healthy Relationships, there is no need to spend hours researching for materials to teach anymore. This program includes a curriculum manual with almost 40 ready-to-use lessons and a plethora of materials and activities to help students learn. These lessons can be taught by following the scope and sequence of our curriculum, which helps educators teach their students in a fashion where each lesson builds on the one before it to increase the student’s knowledge of critical skills.

Also included in Healthy Relationships Curriculum are various materials to help make learning fun for your students with various needs. These include role-playing activities, interactive scenario cards, and nearly 200 video.

These materials will help teachers save time by not having to create materials for their students to use in the classroom. Every handout and activity needed to help students succeed are included with our resource so teachers can spend their energy teaching instead of making materials.

Many educators of students with various needs also can rest easy during the summer, knowing that Healthy Relationships Curriculum has tools built into it to monitor and track student progress across grade levels. These tools help to yield fast, immediate results, which are helpful when adjusting information for students’ needs.

Students’ progress can be tracked in real-time using our Participant Tracking Tools and Skills Evaluation. These allow educators and parents of students to update students’ progress in real-time and uses data to show specific skills students may need more reinforcement on. This means teachers will spend less time worrying about if students understand the materials presented to them and more time helping them build their skills.

Healthy Relationships Curriculum understands the materials special educators need to maximize their time and impact with students effectively. Healthy Relationships is a one-stop shop for all teacher’s needs. If you think your students could benefit from this curriculum, I encourage you to review our overview video and request a free demonstration of Healthy Relationships! And most importantly, enjoy your summer vacation!

Author: Jen Falkowski, MEd — Supervisor of Special Education

At the beginning of May, schools around the country will celebrate teacher appreciation week. As a former special teacher, I can relate to the dedication and commitment of special educators to help their students succeed. Often, special educators will put in extra hours outside of the classroom, working to find lesson plans that work for their students or finding new ways to teach information that students are not grasping. Our Healthy Relationships Team appreciates all your work and is here to help you every step of the way.

The Healthy Relationships Team realizes that all special educators need a little help sometimes, and that’s why it features ongoing consultations and support. We understand that the best way to appreciate special educators is to partner with them and offer our expertise to the challenges you face. Special educators can always ask us questions about lessons and ways to help their students with various needs learn.

What helps make our Healthy Relationships Curriculum easy to use and reliable is the work of the special educators who helped design it. These special educators have been in your shoes and understand and value the hard work you do every single day. That is why they developed our curriculum with strategies and lessons that work.

Our Healthy Relationships Curriculum also features a variety of ways to make teaching your students fun, including role-playing scenarios and interactive instructions—all designed to build practical social skills and activities for students.  Our curriculum features easy ways to connect with parents and encourages caregiver involvement and home reinforcement so that students can practice their skills in real-world settings.

To make it easier and less time-consuming, our Healthy Relationships Curriculum also features digital monitoring tools so you can track students’ progress and find areas where they need support.

I spent more than 20 years as a special education teacher & now a supervisor and have never come across a program that simultaneously supports educators and students. I would encourage you to look at our sample lessons and request a free demonstration of our Healthy Relationships Curriculum! I also encourage you to schedule a meeting with our team and discuss our curriculum. We are always happy to answer your questions!

Author: Jen Falkowski, MEd — Supervisor of Special Education

Springtime is here, and so is the fun that comes with this time of year. The warmer weather and fun activities mean you might need help keeping students motivated. Students with varying needs may even need extra support in staying motivated to succeed in the classroom Luckily, our Healthy Relationships Curriculum provides many fun learning outcomes to help engage your students during the home stretch of the school year.

Part of what helps keep students motivated during the final months of the school year is helping them remember that learning can be fun. Our Healthy Relationships Curriculum provides fun opportunities for our students to learn. Instead of using the same repetitive teaching methods, Healthy Relationships provides students with a variety of fun ways to learn. These ways to learn include:

• Role Plays, Demonstrations, and Life-Skills Activities: The best way to teach life skills is by having students use them. Our role-playing demonstrations allow students to practice the skills they learned during their lessons.
• Over 60 Scenario Cards: These scenario cards turn the lessons into real-life situations to help them better understand the lessons.
• Lesson Activities & Games: Our games are designed to actively teach lessons in a fun, active way to help keep students motivated. These pre-made games were by our team of educators & counselors.
• Fun activities and videos for parents to help students with various needs practice the skills they learned out of the classroom settings
• And much more!

However, students aren’t the only ones who need to find ways to stay motivated; teachers do as well. Sometimes, planning lessons that are fun for students can be time-consuming. We understand this and offer consultations and development opportunities for our teachers so they can help students thrive in and out of the classroom.

I believe our Healthy Relationships Curriculum features the perfect blend of fun activities and support mechanisms to help students succeed in and out of the classroom, especially during the final weeks of the school year. But don’t just take my word for it. If you want to help your students stay motivated to succeed, I encourage you to watch this informational video about our Healthy Relationships Curriculum. After that, request a free demo of our curriculum so you can get started teaching it!

Author: Melissa Ringold, MEd — Curriculum/Instruction Coach

During March, we celebrated Employee Appreciation Day. This day is meant to serve as a thank you to employees for all their hard work. One group that deserves additional notice and “thank yous” are teachers- specifically special education teachers. Special Education teachers work hard to ensure students with varying needs succeed in and out of the classroom. I worked for 20+ years as a special education teacher and know how much work planning lessons for a variety of student needs can be. It takes extra time and effort to develop these lessons. Often, special education teachers’ work goes unnoticed. However, our Healthy Relationships Curriculum strives to help and appreciate teachers every step of the way.

Our Healthy Relationships Curriculum provides special educators the help and support they need when they need it. Whether you are planning lessons or just have a question, we are always ready to assist. We understand that there is only so much time in a day, and you would rather be helping your students succeed than planning lessons or spending hours trying to find answers to a question.

Our Healthy Relationships Curriculum comes with a variety of benefits for instructors so they can spend less time frustrated and more time helping students succeed.

These include:

• Comprehensive Professional Development: We know that teaching special education can be challenging and offer real-life experiences, so you can confidently teach our curriculum.
• Tips & Suggestions For Teaching Lesson Content: We ensure teachers feel appreciated and valued by taking their suggestions seriously and incorporating them into lessons.
• Ongoing Consultation: We want to be your partner and help you through complex topics and challenges during the year.
• Built in measurement tools to easily gauge students learning outcomes.

Additionally, our Healthy Relationships Curriculum is designed to fit seamlessly with IEP requirements and can be worked into lessons you may have already developed.

Our Healthy Relationships Curriculum understands special education teachers’ needs, supports them, and appreciates their work. I wish a program like this had existed when I started teaching to add more guidance to my work and help my students succeed. If you think you could benefit from our curriculum, I encourage you to look at our overview video and request a free demonstration of our Healthy Relationships Curriculum! You can also contact us anytime by reaching out through the chat function on the website. We are always happy to answer educators’ questions!

Every special education instructor knows that the skills taught in the classroom must be reinforced outside of school to help students foster and develop those skills further. Feedback and progress tracking are essential, as they show where students excel and where deficiencies may arise. That’s why our Healthy Relationships Curriculum includes digital monitoring tools to help your track student’s progress.

Our digital monitoring Skills Evaluation in our myHRC Online Participant tracking tools allows educators to see how students use the skills they learned in the classroom in a real-world setting. This tool enables parents/caregivers to update students’ progress at home so that instructors can see what skills are being used in real-time. Our Skills Evaluation allows everyone involved in the student’s education to collect data on the student’s progress, view progress, and praise the students when they use skills taught in the classroom.

Our Participant Tracking tools also assist in allowing educators to know which lessons students with various needs are not grasping and may need additional support. Because of this, educators can make changes to their lessons in real-time to reinforce the skills the students may need extra help with and provide lessons to demonstrate outside the classroom.

Some of the other features of our Skills Evaluation include the ability to:

• Measure IEP/Treatment Goals
• Show what goals are understood and demonstrated by the participant
• Capture participant data from the beginning to the end of courses
• Visually show progress using color-coded graphs
• And much more!

During my 20 years as a special education teacher, I can attest that digital monitoring tools provide needed insights in the classroom. They help educators know what skills are being used at home and allow us to adjust our lessons to help students make progress quickly. Through this program, parents and educators can feel confident that their children/students will make progress. If you want more information about our digital monitoring features and our curriculum, please reach out via the contact us page on our website. Here, you can meet with our team and request sample lessons to see if our Healthy Relationships Curriculum is right for you!

Author: Jen Falkowski, MEd — Supervisor of Special Education