Week 7

Today at learn and serve I talked with the teacher about plans for next week because I am going to be doing a lesson with the kids. I had brought my own book that I picked out. It is a Clifford book of the puppy days called "Halloween Howl". The teacher wants me to do a lesson so that the students can discuss the events of the beginning, middle, and end of the story. I'm going to make up my own worksheet to hand out to the students with lines and questions that will prompt the students to write about the events.

Before library I worked with one student while he did a simple math worksheet. This student is the farthest behind in the class. The math problems were simple addition facts. When he came over to me he had 3 questions done, and each answer was wrong. One question was 2+2 and he answered 8. What I did was I showed him how to use his fingers or a visual. I was not sure how the students were taught to do addition but I figured this was the best way to start out for now. I got him to realize how to count up. Once he was able to answer a couple of the questions on his own, I had him count up and try it without his fingers. He struggled a little more with this, I think because he was trying to guess rather than actually try but every time he was much closer to the answer.

While the students had library and read about a principle that wore different ties for every feeling and event, I talked with the teacher to get some more details about each of the students IEPs. I learned of some new methods that the teachers use with these students as a better aid to learning. One is TouchMath. This method in math is that each number has dots that can be used to count. As the student has to add the number they can add the "dots" on the number instead. Another method that was mentioned is called Handwriting without Tears but the teacher was not able to tell me too much about that program. What we did talk about was the FastForWord that the students go to. I have heard of this program before but she told me a little more about it. The program is especially essential for these students because it focuses on phonetics and it allows the students to hear how words and letters are correctly pronounced. This helps the students who especially have problems in speech.

Chapter 7 talks about language and speech. Which fits in with a few of the students in my classroom. Some of them are pulled for speech therapy because pronunciation is difficult for them. I have seen a lesson done with the teacher and two students with words broken down to few letters so they can sound out the word. But FastForward is the best program to help students that may struggle with language or speech because they are able to hear how words sound phonetically. They can learn to pronounce words correctly, spell the words and read them. The program is really effective overall in the language department. None of the students have such a hard time communicating or speaking that they cannot communicate but for some students they do and the books spells out the language development for kids so one can see where a child may have fallen off track and needed extra help.