culturally responsive teaching

Classroom Tested: D.A.R.E. Choice Board BUNDLE 7 Continents: Special Education ELL/ML

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This post explores how the D.A.R.E. Choice Board BUNDLE for 7 Continents transformed geography instruction in inclusive classrooms. Faced with the challenge of teaching continents to learners with diverse needs—struggling readers, multilingual students, and neurodiverse thinkers—the author shares how choice boards built on UDL and SIOP frameworks bring engagement, accessibility, and student agency to social studies. Each continent’s choice board offers simplified informational text, visuals, and four differentiated tasks (Do, Answer, Recommend, Explain), empowering students to select meaningful ways to show learning. With scaffolded supports, sentence frames, and visual aids, this bundle makes complex content accessible, supports diverse ways of responding, and helps teachers collect meaningful data while students stay motivated and take ownership of their learning.

My Friend Flaps Their Hands: A Celebration of Stimming (BOOK: Children’s/ YA)

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What if a child’s joy was simply too big to stay inside their body? That’s Toby — a boy whose happy flap isn’t a behavior to correct, but a language all its own. My Friend Flaps Their Hands: A Celebration of Stimming is a neuro-affirming eBook by NBCT Maria Angala that takes stimming out of the shadows and turns it into something worth celebrating. Through warm, rhythmic storytelling, the book teaches peers and classmates that rocking, humming, and hand-flapping are natural self-regulation tools — as normal as a wagging tail or a nervous lip bite. It’s a classroom conversation-starter that builds empathy without a lecture. Written at the 420L–820L Lexile range, this low-prep TpT resource is IEP-scaffolded and aligned to CCSS RL.3.1 and RL.3.3. Available as an eBook, digital PDF, and interactive Easel Activities. For every classroom ready to stop quieting difference — and start celebrating it.

How I Use the STAR Strategy for Math Word Problems | Problem Solving Step

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This post shows how Maria Angala, NBCT, teaches students a clear, step-by-step approach to solving math word problems using the STAR Strategy (Scan, Think, Answer, Review). Many learners struggle not because they lack computation skills but because they don’t know how to approach the problem itself. STAR gives them a predictable routine: Scan the problem to understand what’s being asked, Think about operations and information, Answer with a complete solution, and Review to check accuracy and reasoning. With visuals, anchor charts, and practice, students build confidence, reduce overwhelm, and strengthen problem-solving independence. This strategy supports neurodiverse and multilingual learners by making abstract processes concrete and organized, helping them transfer skills across grade levels and math content areas.

How I Use the STAR Reading Comprehension Strategy | Task Analysis

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This post explains how Maria Angala, NBCT, uses a structured STAR reading strategy to support students who struggle with managing the steps of comprehension tasks. Instead of leaving learners to guess how to approach questions, she breaks down the process into predictable steps—Start with the question, Think and read the text, Answer the question, and Reread to check work—so students gain confidence and independence. By turning “read and answer” into a clear routine, Maria helps neurodiverse, multilingual, and struggling readers reduce overwhelm, stay focused on the evidence in the text, and self-monitor their thinking. With anchor charts and visuals serving as a “silent co-teacher,” students shift from confusion to purposeful reading and build the habits of thoughtful comprehension across content areas.

How I Teach Summarizing Reading Comprehension Strategy

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This post shares how Maria Angala, NBCT, teaches students to summarize text with purpose and clarity by focusing on key ideas instead of retelling every detail. She explains the common struggle learners have with identifying important information and offers a practical, structured routine using the 5W’s and 1H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How) to guide thinking. With simple scaffolds like graphic organizers and visual prompts, students learn to filter out unimportant details, highlight essentials, and write concise summaries. This strategy builds stronger reading comprehension, critical thinking, and academic writing skills that transfer across subjects, helping students become more independent and confident readers.

How to Teach Summarizing as a Reading Comprehension Strategy for Students with Disabilities and ELL Learners

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In this post, Maria Angala, NBCT, shares how she teaches students to think about their thinking using a structured metacognition strategy. She explains the shift from focusing only on finished work to helping learners plan, monitor, and reflect on their process, which supports independence and deeper understanding. By breaking tasks into concrete phases—Plan, Monitor, and Reflect—students gain tools to set goals, check their thinking in real time, and evaluate what worked. This approach helps neurodiverse and multilingual learners build executive functioning, self-awareness, and problem-solving skills they can use across content areas and beyond the classroom, preparing them for future success.