Teaching Methods for Mentally Retarded Children

Every child is a complete blank slate, but there are always some children who have intellectual disabilities. For these special children, their learning methods are very different. During the teaching process, teachers will generally be more careful and the teaching process will be more difficult. Situational teaching, practical operations and social adaptation are all common and effective teaching methods, which are more helpful for children with intellectual problems.

Situational teaching method is an intuitive and concrete teaching method.

In teaching, teachers strive to create a situation that is similar or corresponding to the teaching content, so that there is scenery in the situation, emotion in the scenery, and the situation and situation are integrated, so as to deepen students' understanding and application of knowledge. Bring students into real-life scenarios to practice the knowledge and skills they have learned in school. Teachers provide on-site guidance on problems that students encounter during practice, repeatedly practice correct operating skills, and reinforce students' standardized behavior through various means. "The situational teaching in the social adaptation course emphasizes children's real life situations and is a real situation teaching method. Teaching activities are real activities in students' real lives. Therefore, in teaching, teachers should consider each student's natural schedule and specific activity environment. For example, in the teaching course of buying lunch, we will go to the fast food restaurants that students often go to during their normal lunch time to teach, so that students can master relevant knowledge and skills through continuous practice.

Practical learning method.

Through specific operations and practice, intellectually retarded children can master some common sense of life, the purpose and use of items, and develop useful life skills. For example, when learning to use a DVD player, the best way to learn is to let them operate it themselves. The practical operation learning of the social adaptation course is also implemented in specific situations, and they will get a natural result to reinforce it after each practice. For example, during leisure activities, let students operate the DVD player and turn on the video disc so that they can watch their favorite cartoons.

The social adaptation course emphasizes the integrity of activities in teaching.

For example, shopping is a continuous process from budgeting, preparing bags, choosing a store, selecting shopping items, paying, to finally checking and taking away the items. Different from general functional course teaching, social adaptation courses do not divide them into several classes (such as learning to calculate money, learning to choose stores, learning the shopping process, etc.), but students go through the entire shopping process in each learning activity. Therefore, the adoption of supportive or auxiliary teaching strategies is one of the main teaching methods of social adaptation courses. For example, if student L’s focus is to master the process of buying towels in a supermarket, but he cannot calculate the price yet, then in this environment, the teacher can provide him with support or assistance so that he can complete the entire activity of buying towels.