Learn and Serve October 14th (2 hours)

Learn and Serve October 14th

Well before I talk about what I did today and how this picture related to what I participated in with the students, I want to talk about something that we briefly talked about in last class. We were talking about "escaping reality". I have one little boy in my class who I believe is trying to escape class but I am not really sure why. He is always trying to fall asleep and when anyone pays any attention to him at all he gets very mad at almost a scary level. When he is corrected and doesn't want to fix his mistakes he just gets really mad and then as soon as he thinks no one is paying attention to him any longer he is fine. I do know that he is a repeater; he is in first grade for the second time so maybe he feels as if he is being picked on for that reason, but he is not the only repeater in the classroom. Also I feel as if something is going on at home. I have this feeling because whenever the teacher may say something like I am going to call your parents; he gets a very scared look on his face. I know all little kids are scared of getting yelled at by their parents but this is different, he seems terrified. Also little kids should not be falling asleep in the middle of school. Perhaps for some reason he is not able to get the proper amount of sleep a child needs.

Alright now for what I did in class today. For the most part today in class the students were getting caught up on their hand writing lessons. I was able to work individually with some of the students and also able to walk around and observe the way the students where working and conducting themselves. There were some students in the class that went right through the assignment with no trouble at all. The students that I was working with were some that have serious trouble focusing and staying on task. What I was to do was to continue to tell the kids to keep working. They were very capable of doing the work it was just remembering and concentrating on what they were doing was the problem. The reason for the picture at the top is because I noticed that what the kids had trouble with most was understanding, that the lower case letters need to start and end at the middle dotted line that they were not to go past that. One other observation that I was able to make was one of the aids working with a boy who struggled with understanding what to even write. He struggles with everything and it is almost difficult to watch. It isn't that he is fooling around; it is just that he starts to give up because he doesn't feel that he can do it. I also felt that the aid was handling the situation very poorly getting very frustrated with him as if it was his fault.
After a little hint from Professor.... Handwriting Without Tears.. This site seems to have some very powerful tools in aiding students in building their skills. Handwriting can become tedious and boring. Students do not want to continually write the same letter over and over again until it becomes perfect this often caused the letters to become even sloppier because they become careless and bored. I also don't really see this as the most effect of way of perfecting handwriting. In order to write properly students also need to have good fine motor skills and this does not always mean just practicing the letters but building these skills in other ways. In handwriting without tears the system seems to focus on building fine motor skills rather than just going right to the pencil and paper. Using things such as clay, blocks, wood block and other tools students are able to build up to writing with just paper and pencils. There are crayons that flip which help students build fine motor skills. Some of the other manipulative help students learn spacial reference. I also found it interesting that they would have the students start with only two lines rather than three. They build on the spacial aspect of letters step by step. I think that the slate chalkboards would be a good tool for the kids that I work with because they are always so worried about erasing their work and that a lot of their pencils don't have erasers. This way they could just wipe it off without the trouble of the erasing.

Chapter twelve discusses children with physical disabilities, health impairments, and multiple disabilities (Kirk, Gallagher, Coleman, & Anastasiow, 2009). Often students with some of these disabilities may not be able to write at all so assistive technology is needed to aid them in their studies. This may include a simple output device, voice output device with levels, one with icon sequencing, dynamic display or speech synthesis for typing. Another assistive device could be just being able to use a computer rather than having to use a pen and pencil. Also some of the assistive devices that I discussed from handwriting without tears could be useful for student with disabilities such as health impairments and physical impairments. Although this may not make them be able to write as they should it may help give them some of the skills so that they can feel a little bit more like they fit in with their classmates.

Kirk S. , Gallagher J.J. , Coleman M.R. , & Anastasiow N. (2009). Educating Exceptional Children (12th ed. , pp. 403-447). Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.