Out of Many, One Education

Well, after looking back at my pictures I realized I left out a couple of lessons that I have done while here! So this will be a catch up on all things school since I have been here. Mosaics Most consistently I have been teaching visual arts (art class) and physical education. I think it was the second week that I did mosaics with the kids. I had an outline of their name and they glued little squares of colored paper over the outline to make a mosaic of their name. I gave each of them a glue stick… that was an adventure lol. I hadn’t thought of this before but the glue sticks here are very teacher controlled as it is a resource that is expensive. So, you can imagine how curious the students were about it! I had a few students trying to put it all over their hands and some students that had no idea how it worked. It was pretty comical overall. I picked this project for a few reasons, the first was because my lesson prior focused on them writing their names. This was...

This post is very late—but better late than never, right? The days are full, long, and often without Wi-Fi! But I am going to sum up last week for you: First, my professor came and observed me teaching a physical  education lesson. We did volleyball with balloons (so students had more reaction time to it coming at them and it would hurt much less if it hit them!)  I first had them warm up with some Go Noodle videos which  they loved. We were up and moving and hot early on! Then we moved into talking about the types of hits in volleyball; serve, bump, and set (I hope Mrs.Goodman and Mr. Barron are proud of me!). We said the names several times over and I made sure each individual student knew it. Then we practiced making the motion followed by having each student practice the hit. Once we had gone through all of them we were going to pair up, go outside, and practice more. Soo…. we moved all the students outside (which is a feat for ou...

Yesterday was conference day here at Church Teachers College! Every year my professor Dr. Stevens helps organize a special education conference that takes place on campus. When they started 5 years ago they had 80 participants, this year they had ~600!!!! WOW. Something I find kind of interesting and again speaks to the culture is that the night before the conference the number of people registered was around 400. So that means 200 people called in the evening/ early morning or just showed up on day of! Don’t get me wrong, we were all excited but wow! The topic that My partner Lizzy and I presented on was picture communication. Our session was called: Giving Students a Voice: Symbols for Communication. We talked about how teachers might utilize symbols as a means of communication for students who are non-verbal. This would allow them to participate more fully in their education and give them a voice they didn’t have before. After giving the audience the critical information, ...

I have learned two things today I am severely out of shape... I was sore from all that moving in physical education yesterday I am stronger than I know... I have been pushed, shoved, grabbed, and hit today (and it really hasn't phased me)... Welcome to Special Education!  Today is my last day of school as I am presenting at the conference at Church Teacher's College, tomorrow. Today I wanted to work specifically with the student whose first experience with school started this year. For his privacy, and for the convenience of writing, I am going to call him Fred. To recap, Fred is a student who has autism and has not been in the school system until this September. He does not talk but can follow some simple directions and gestures. Most of the time, sadly he is just sitting in the corner not doing anything while instruction continues for the rest of the class. His needs are more than what the teacher can currently accomodate with all of her other students. So, today I wan...

Yesterday was the first day of class that I participated in. I am at Woodlawn Special Education School which is a school for students with disabilities. I am paired with Ms. Green who teaches 11B. In Jamaica I learned, the students only go to grade 11 so essentially, she teaches the oldest kids at the school. For my school, they have both A and B classes where the A students are generally higher functioning than the B students. My class has currently 10 students in it (possibly two more joining later as they are having transportation issues getting to school currently because of the rain). About half of them have down syndrome which to me seemed odd to me as it seemed like a lot. When I asked about it, I was told that the physical characteristics make it easy to diagnose, so they are placed at Woodlawn. (The outside of my school, I’ll try to take some inside ones tomorrow!)  I have another student in the class who has autism. I was told by my teacher that he didn't go to school fo...