Learn and Serve October 16th (2 hours)

Learn and Serve October 16
Last week in class while working with the smart boards it made me think about my learn and serve. There are so many wonderful things that can be done on the smart board. My teacher chooses to use it as a blackboard more than as a tool. There are aids that come into the classroom that do use the smart board for what it is meant to be. I do also realize that there are times that it is necessary to use it only as a blackboard. It just frustrates me that it is in her room and she never uses it the way it is meant to be used.

This week in class I was there for longer than usual and a different time than usual so I was able to see different activities. I was there this week for a spelling lesson, math, and some reading.

The first thing that I was able to participate in was math. This lesson is demonstrated in the pictures at the top of the page. The concept that they were learning was greater and fewer. I worked with a few of the students who have IEP, they were with me to just help them focus a little better. This was a very difficult concept for the entire class to understand as a whole and even harder for the individuals who were with me. It was much easier for them when they had visuals in front of them. My placement teacher provided me with stackable cubes that looked exactly like the ones on their assignment. When they were able to see and touch the blocks and pick them apart, understanding the concept was much easier.
We are always told that there are different learners in every classroom. That everyone learns differently. Some people like pictures others like to read everything in front of them. How do teacher's accommodate to all of these different learners during the course of a lesson? Is it possible to get the same point across to everyone when there are so many different learners in the same classroom? This is why technology is becoming so important in today's classroom. Students are so familiar with computers that technology is becoming such a powerful tool.

After moving on from the math lesson, the students were told that their next lesson was a spelling test, no one liked this at all. Everyone in synk yelled NOOOOOOOOOOO. The way that their spelling tests work is that each week there are five words that they add to the word wall. The teacher very slowly reads them the words in a sentence. They are to write the words and the sentence as she reads it out loud. Also they are to underline the words that have come from the word wall. There is one student in the class that suffers with such a severe learning disability that the teacher does not even challenge him to write the words in context, he just writes that words numbered one through five. It was my job to give this young man his spelling test on Friday. I was to just read each word to him and maybe sound out the words a little, but he was to be given no help at all. I found that he did not hear the vowels at all. In words such as big and get all he could hear was the b and g or g and t if he could even hear this. He was struggling a lot. It was not that he was not trying he just could not hear the letters or remember how to spell the words at all.
I feel that for this student deciding to not have him write out all of the sentences only to write the words out of context is the right choice. I could see how frustrated he was becoming even performing this task that I believe if he was asked to write out the whole sentence he would shut down and stop trying. I had to convince him to keep trying and telling him that he would do it as is. I could not imagine how overwhelmed he would become if he had to do anymore than he was already required.
By having the student do this the teacher is using Universal Design for Learning. She is modifying the activity to the student's level of learning. He is still using all of the same spelling words as the other students but rather than writing them in context he is writing them out of context. She is responding to the different learning needs and styles of the student.

The last activity that I participated in that day was reading. I was to watch over the students who were doing their independent reading while the aids and the placement teacher were working with small reading groups. I noticed that for some students reading and staying on task is very easy. For other students this is daunting, they need to be constantly reminded what they are to do and that they cannot just decide they would like to be done whenever they feel like it.

Chapter eleven talks about children with visual impairments (Kirk, Gallagher, Coleman, & Anastasiow, 2009). Doing the activity with the manipulative made me think about children with visual impairments. Although they will not be able to better understand the concept when it is on paper when they can pull the blocks apart and feel them they may be able to better understand the concept being taught. Having this though made me look through the chapter a bit more closely and I was interested to find that the three components of emergent literacy with children who are visually impaired are promoting oral language, promoting metalinguistic awareness, and promoting print and Braille literacy knowledge.



Kirk S. , Gallagher J.J. , Coleman M.R. , & Anastasiow N. (2009). Educating Exceptional Children (12th ed. , pp. 322-361). Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.