Karlie at  We Are ALL Special ! recently wrote a post asking about the roles of paraprofessionals in our classrooms. Originally I was going to just comment on her post but as I started thinking about all the things my wonderful paras do I realized it was too much for one comment! So I decided to sum it up on this week's Think About It Thursday post... I have two paras (Miss J and Miss T) that have been with me for 6 years (which is my entire classroom teaching career!). Since we all started out together and have been together for so long we have really developed an amazing team (if I do say so myself!). I have a hard time envisioning my classroom without them. We each have different strengths and weaknesses and we have learned over the years how to balance each other out and I plan our schedule and assign roles accordingly. For instance, I can be a scatter-brain during the day because I am always thinking about the 22 emails I haven't read yet, which IEP is due next week, ......

This year we have six paraprofessionals that we truly could not live without! This summer my teaching team and I worked hard to come up with a paraprofessional handbook to streamline our classroom procedures and communicate our expectations to our paras (old and new!).  To go with our handbooks, I made these Paraprofessional Survival Kits . They include lots of the essential items (mostly office supplies) that our paras will need this year. It was a great, practical back to school gift and it also aligned with our handbook. For instance, one thing we want paras to do this year is share their thoughts or concerns on a Concern Clipboard in a central team communication area in the classroom so we included post-it notes in the bag. Also, we have paras leading groups so we want them to record student progress and take notes to let us know how things are going. Therefore, we provided each para with a notebook.  What else did we include? Click on the links below for Am......