Functional Curriculum Students With Moderate

Functional Curriculum

Students with moderate to severe mental limitations caused by retardation face a multitude of challenges within their lives. As a way to help prepare them for these additional challenges, functional curriculum aims to help facilitate independent living and vocational skills alongside with traditional academic curriculum. This type of context helps prepare students to live an independent and functional life after school.

There are obvious limitations for the minds and capabilities for students with mental handicaps, much as moderate to severe mental retardation. In accordance with this fact, it is clear that the curriculum geared towards such a student body population must reflect those limitations and set reasonable goals. Thus, functional curriculum is a viable option within lesson plans directed towards the education of mentally retarded students. Within the context of functional curriculum, lesson plans are directed towards facilitating independent living skills as well as viable vocational skills that will help train such students to live as independently in the real world as possible (Heward 2002). Teaching various social skills is also a way to prepare such students for living on their own in the modern world. Thus, functional curriculum leaves out traditional academic skills in order to favor the facilitation of living skills that will help the students be independent an active in their adult lives.

To meet the goals of facilitating independent living within mentally retarded students within the context of a regular classroom, there are several aspects functional curriculum must meet. First, functional curriculum must prove age appropriate based on the ages of the students within each and every classroom. In younger grades, "the emphasis on these skills can be peripheral to the development of basic academic and social skills," (Sedlak 1985:149). This is the time where functional curriculum can slowly be meshed into the equation with traditional curriculums found in average classrooms. As the students get older and progress in their mental functioning, more and more vocational-based training should be implemented in order to prepare for entrance into the job market. This does not mean ignoring academics completely, but more so highlighting vocational and independent living skills above traditional academic contexts. Within this generalized set up, each student must work at his or her own pace; "While the subject matter will parallel that taught to the regular student, the manner in which the information is resented, the rate at which material is covered, an the emphasis on individual needs should differentiate it from instructional practices in the regular grades," (Sedlak 1985:149). This is where self-contained classrooms can prove an advantage. They will allow the students to work at their own pace individually and constructively without feeling pressure to keep up with normal students.