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 for many years, and then started this September. Therefore, she is working on basic life skills with him. He is non, verbal but can follow simple directions. I have noticed he does better when given visual prompts. I asked my teacher if they have tried symbol communication with him and she said no. I am going to bring something in to see if I can make some progress with him at least being able to express what he wants, when he wants it though the visual symbols.
Yesterday I stepped in and taught some lessons when the teacher had to do something else. I taught part of home management and math class! (who would have thought math! I hope my prof. Amy Gee would be proud of me! I even started pulling back concepts from her class to gauge where the students were performing). Something that was interesting and I was not ready for yesterday was the almost two hour afternoon period that had nothing planned for it. I was keeping the students busy as I thought the teacher wasn't ready yet, but then she told me I could keep going because they hadn't had their planning meeting yet so they didn't have any instruction planned. (I think I was in a bit of shock over that comment!) So I kept them busy and told them all about Wisconsin and even tried to explain snow (it didn't go over well. lol.). After class I asked about the meeting that they were to have to plan and she said the other teachers were busy so they would have it tomorrow, maybe. The Jamaican people, I have learned, are very relaxed and this is one example of that.
As a result of the lack of the meeting, I asked to create a lesson for the gap (Language and Communication class). Today we did it and practiced writing their names. I made a sheet for each of them to trace with a whiteboard marker and then also a matching game for their names to reinforce the spelling of it. I think overall it went well-- I needed to differentiate a bit more for some of my learners but it was a good learning experience.( I will post/add pictures later).
My teacher also asked me if I wanted to teach physical education too-- of course I said yes even though I am the least active person I know lol. But she mentioned that we could do videos (which I thought was funny for gym) but I was excited that they had a laptop and projector that I could use for lessons. (They also have a SMART Board that doesn't get used often) So last night I found some Go Noodle videos on stretching and then some activity to do while we are in the class and then go into beginning catching with tennis balls. If it is not raining, we can go outside so I hope that is the case! I will try to update later on how it goes! Wish me luck!!
UPDATE: Physical education was a SUCCESS! I used Go Noodle and we stretched and got our bodies moving! They were all smiles and we were ALL working up a sweat! 😂 one of them acatually, accidentally, unplugged the computer we were moving around so much! Then we went into some basic catching and after some demonstration they got the hang of it! Tennis balls were still rolling around all over but the concept was there. We added a bounce to it and then everyone had one to bounce! It really helped with their fine and gross motor skills. It was very fun! I had even the teachers laughing (hopefully not at me either 😂). The agriculture teacher asked why I hadn’t invited him— he wanted to join in too! (We were also inside because of a heavy downpour minutes before!)
I also busted out the dinosaur and turtle stickers today. They loved them 😍
I will try to add some pictures later! (Need to check permissions)
Out of Many, One Education.
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