Special needs students with limited communicative abilities often express themselves through arts and crafts, so this medium offers a familiar platform on which these students can work. Almost all arts and crafts have embedded math concepts, such as measuring, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing and fractions. Choose projects related to your students' areas of interests and embed the concepts in your curriculum. For example, require students to shade parts of a paper to teach fractions.
Music is a mathematical discipline, but it doesn't hold the same stigma as math for many special needs students. So, when students are clapping rhythms and learning the beat value of notes they are learning math without realizing it. Channel the mathematical power of music into the concepts you want to teach your children by developing lessons around music. For example, you can begin teaching algebra using time signatures and notes' beat values. Before you introduce variables, have students solve "equations" that require them to choose a combination of notes that will keep the requisite number of beats in a measure.
According to the Internet Special Education Resource, many students who have learning disabilities are visual learners. This means that teachers can't simply tell them how math concepts work, they have to show them. However, "showing" students doesn't mean just doing a problem on the overhead. Bring visuals into your classroom by demonstrating concepts using toys, blocks, pieces of chalk, money or any other items that students can easily count and observe as you manipulate them. For example, to teach simple subtraction, you might have students count how many blocks are in a tower, ask one student to remove two blocks, and count the number of blocks again.
Special education students will better understand and be more motivated to learn mathematical concepts when they understand the practical application of what they are learning, reports the Internet Special Education Resource. For this reason, you should explain the rationale behind what students are learning and give them practical problems to help them situate the concepts you teach them. For example, special education students will better understand measurement concepts if you explain how they relate to home repair and give them home repair-based problems.