Week 8 (2nd Placement)

     I'm going to start this week's blog by saying that after my first day at my new placement, I considered running away and never coming back. Really, I did. I went from being with 20 regular ed. 4th graders, to 8 students ages 9-13 that functioned at around an 18 month-old level. That was a dramatic change. This was a scary new experience. I had absolutely no idea of where to even begin. I had never been with a population this low on the spectrum before and it terrified me. I truly do believe that every child is capable of learning, but I had no idea how to go about doing this.
     Throughout the week, I slowly started to become more comfortable with where my placement was. By Thursday, I was starting to enjoy it and I was looking forward to going. This is going to be a placement where I will be doing a lot more aiding than actual teaching. I spent my week observing and jumping in with little things. We do a lot of positioning the students, feeding them, stretching them, changing them, and making sure that they get their therapy and other sorts of special services. On the first day there, one of the aides had me jump in an change a diaper and help her lift students and take off their coats. I was concerned especially with lifting. Most of these kids are very fragile and I have not had any special training of any sort with lifting. I don't want to hurt them. I talked to my teacher, Sue, about this and she assured me that she didn't want me to do anything I'm uncomfortable with and that they will teach me how to do all of it.
     I saw a lot of different things this week: Conductive ed., p.t., o.t., swimming, and I sat through 2 IEP's. On the first day I was there, I witnessed a few seizures. I saw a Grand mal and I believe petite grand mal. Now I have seen many seizures, but this one was very scary, because my student was sleeping in his stander when all of a sudden he started seizing. I have never seen people move that fast. Wow. I also realized how important it is to make sure everything is done correctly and to make sure that these students are safe, first and foremost. There were a couple of incidents where the aides were careless and the students could have been seriously hurt. Thankfully, they were okay.
     Even though I will not be doing a lot of teaching at this placement, I have no doubt that I will learn a lot just by being exposed to everything. I am already trying to plan activities around Dr. Seuss and his books. Another challenge with this placement is going to be all of the adults in the room. Holy cow. There is so much "take charge" in the room. I have no idea how Sue does it. She has to manage all the adults and make sure the students are taken care of. I'm sure I will learn a lot from her about that. I can already see that having a staff that is willing to work together is key to running a successful classroom.

Schmidt
     Chapter 6 in Schmidt was one of my favorite chapters thus far. I love reading and writing. I want my students to love it too. As I have said before, at my last placement I started creative writing with my students. I gave them a picture and instructed them to write a story about it. They basically had free reign. I think this really excited a lot of them. Students have GREAT imaginations and are rarely given the opportunity to use them. I know my group of students were very creative in their writings.
     I was excited to see that we used one of the strategies  in Schmidt's book. "Listen and Draw," is a strategy we used every day during Read Aloud. I would read from a novel for about 15 minutes and the students would draw what  they were hearing. Something that would especially stick out to them or a kind of collage of key things from the story. I also enjoy "Author's Hour." Giving students the opportunity to have the spotlight and read their stories is a great incentive for doing their best work and being creative. There were many great ideas, but these were my favorites.