As a teacher of students with learning disabilities, I find that, especially as they grow, motivation can be a challenge. How do you find ways to motivate your students who struggle most with learning?

What strategies could be used to support an upper elementary student with a learning disability and speech language impairment in constructing grammatically correct sentences. Often, for these students on my caseload, I find that they struggle to apply conventions when writing down their ideas. Run-on sentences (or even just seemingly jumbled words) are frequent!

I have a single student in my class with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This student demonstrates needs in developing empathy. At this time, I do not have outside support in addressing these needs for this student so any efforts will be my own, alone (hoping to look into additional services soon). My content area is language arts and finding time to address these specific needs is a challenge.

How might I support this student’s social emotional needs with so little time to invest?

I’m noticing that more behaviors are arising in class at this midpoint of the year. I am continuing to evaluate our practices and my interventions, but not quite understanding why this seemingly sudden shift in how my students are responding. Any tips?