Materials Wednesday: Common Core Matrix

If you are like me, your state standards were easy to select from: the choice for SLP's in my state was pretty much between 2 goals: a receptive goal and an expressive goal.  Almost anything we wanted to work on tied to one of those two goals.  

Of course, we have all spent time getting familiar with the Common Core State Standards.  What I realized very quickly when starting to use them was that I was NOT going to be able to keep them straight in my head.  Not when they change each grade level, and I was now working with students K-8.  That's way too many numbers for me to remember.  It's also a HUGE time waster to figure out where to find an applicable standard each time I want to write a new goal or make a lesson plan. 

Enter my Common Core Speech Pathologist Matrix for grades K-12. A one page reference sheet that provides a corresponding Common Core Standard by grade level and goal area.

See?  So if I have a student that is working on articulation, I consult my handy dandy sheet, and know exactly where to look in my (free!) Common Core Standards App that I talked about on Monday.  I find it especially handy for language goals, so I know exactly what my students should be expected to do regarding story retells or vocabulary.  I also can easily look forward or back a year to determine what skills will be needed or may be lacking.

The goal areas are for the topics listed below.  You can see for some areas, it's not a goal we target in the K-1 groups.  I don't write goals for analogies for kindergarteners, but I might work on categories, which I probably wouldn't work on with older kids.

I refer to my matrix constantly.  At IEP meetings if I have to develop a goal, this saves me a ton of time.  If I am looking for educational impact, it's nice to have this as a reference.  It's also great to have when I am talking with the special education teacher and we are discussing how our goals might overlap, and how we will each target an area. In fact, I keep a copy of this on my clipboard at all times, as well as a copy hanging in each of my offices.'

Although in the end, always use your professional discretion. There may be more than one CCSS that targets a goal area, and if you feel that said standard is more representative of what you want to target, please use that one. I am certainly not the be all and end all expert on this.

This is obviously my way of organizing the CCSS.  Does anyone have a better way? How big was the change from your state standards to the CCSS?  How is your district doing with the shift?

If you are interested in purchasing my matrix, you can get it here.