Final Reflection

What makes the inclusion of children with exceptionalities successful?

-Inclusion can be made successful; by making sure you maximize every student's learning. Students with disabilities often need extra directions, visual schedules, and peer buddies in order to be successful in an inclusion environment. Also, the regular education teacher and the special education teacher need to collaborate weekly and look at what is and what is not working in order to maximize results for the student.

What are some barriers to successful inclusion?
- I think that students who have severe and profound disabilities, students with multiple disabilities, and students with low incidence disabilities are served better in a separate setting where there direct needs can be met. Many of the severe and profound students in the classroom at my school are non-verbal had have feeding tubes. They would not benefit from an inclusion setting.
Individual perception of inclusion: Who should be included in the general classroom? 
-I have mixed feelings about inclusion. I feel that inclusion is very beneficial for students who have high functioning autism, learning disabilities, ADHD. Research shows that students learn best from their peers. Students with disabilities will benefit greatly from their non-disabled peers.

 How can you determine if inclusion is appropriate for a child?
You can determine if inclusion is appropriate for a child by progress on their IEP goals. If students are 100% in an inclusion setting and are not making significant progress on their IEP goals, maybe they should be pulled out for a session for extra support or looked at for a different placement.

Thoughts on Inclusion

I have mixed feelings about inclusion. I think that students who have severe and profound disabilities, students with multiple disabilities, and students with low incidence disabilities  are served better in a separate setting where there direct needs can be met. Many of the severe and profound students in the classroom at my school are non-verbal had have feeding tubes. They would not benefit from an inclusion setting.

I feel that inclusion is very beneficial for students who have high functioning autism, learning disabilities, ADHD. Research shows that students learn best from their peers. Students with disabilities will benefit greatly from their non-disabled peers. Inclusion can be made successful, by making sure you maximize every student's learning. Students with disabilities often need extra directions, visual schedules,  and peer buddies in order to be successful in an inclusion environment. Also, the regular education teacher and the special education teacher need to collaborate weekly and look at what is and what is not working in order to maximize results for the student.

Assistive Technology

My focus child and everyone in his Pre-Kindergarten class are verbal and able to make choices verbally, share information (sometimes when prompted) and wants and needs at an appropriate level. I did have some low tech experience with Assistive Technology in my practicum experience. This consisted of a touch screen computer called a hatch.

In the Elementary School ,where I am a special education resource teacher, we do have an Intellectually Disability Severe and Profound class where most of the students have multiple disabilities. In this class there are 3 Kindergarten students, 2 first grade students, 1 second grade student, and 1 fifth grade student. All of the students are non-verbal. 4 of them are in wheelchairs and 4 of them can walk on their own. After watching the video, many of the assitive technology devices that were shown are being used in this ID Severe classroom. The teacher uses big Mac's to assist the children with being verbal. She will use to them to help them make choices and answer yes or no questions. She also sends them home with the students periodically for their parents to record their night and home and then the next day each child can share with their classmates at school.
I am also certified in adaptive curriculum in North Carolina and could possibly teach in a low incidence classroom, and if I ever decide to, I will definitely incorporate assistive technology into my classroom.

Skill Used in Visual System

Hello Everyone!

I hope that you all had a wonderful 4th of July weekend. 2 weeks ago on my blog I accidently posted about the visual system that I would be using for my task analysis. If you missed it I did a bathroom schedule for my focus child that consisted of the following steps:

1) open bathroom door
2) close bathroom door
3) pull pants down
4) potty
5) wipe
6) pull pants up
7) flush
8) wash hands
9) dry hands
10) exit bathroom

He seemed to do very well with this schedule and liked looking at the pictures (made from boardmaker). He recently graduated Pre-K (last week) and will be attending a Cross Categorical Kindergarten class. I sent this bathroom schedule with him in his classroom folder, in case his teacher would like to use it with him in her class.

Now, I will discuss my prompting competency (which I should have discussed 2 weeks ago). My focus child has trouble cleaning up after center time. He  is a very independent child and does not like to be told what to do. His teacher would play the, "We Are Family" song at the end of centers to transition her students to clean up and be seated at the carpet before the song ended. He would either a) ignore the song and continue playing or b) go directly to the carpet without cleaning up. I did the assessment on him and went down the steps all the way to full physical. I suggested that it would help if we made cleaning up a game and saying things such as, "I wonder if you can pick up the toys faster than I can?" or "Do you think you can clean up before I count to 10?" I think that he needs to see cleaning up as fun for it to work. Cleaning up was something that his teachers worked on all year and he still would not always comply with the requests.

I hope everyone has a wonderful week!!

Heather

Communication Strategies

It is very important to encourage interaction and to develop communication strategies with children. Children need exposure to a language rich environment in order to succeed in school in the future. So many academic objectives are focused around a child expanding on their answer or explaining why they chose one answer versus another answer. Children need communication strategies in order to be able to expand on their communication skills.

I am very excited to work with a student on the 8 milieu techniques of communication to encourage interaction and to further develop communication skills. I think these strategies are going to come in handy on how I can incorporate communication into my daily routine of teaching.

Motor and Self-Help Skills

My focus child is very independent. He has age appropriate gross and fine motor skills. I spoke with his teacher and she mentioned that even though he is potty-trained, he plays in the bathroom (runs around with pants down, doesn't always shut bathroom door) and would benefit from a bathroom schedule. I have created a bathroom schedule with pictures from board-maker for him that include the following steps:

1) open bathroom door
2) close bathroom door
3) pull pants down
4) potty
5) wipe
6) pull pants up
7) flush
8) wash hands
9) dry hands
10) exit bathroom

I went over the schedule with him and taped it to the bathroom door in his classroom. It seems to work pretty well. I had it laminated and his classroom teacher is going to send it with his folder to his new school where he will be enrolled in a Cross Categorical Kindergarten class in August.

Social Story Skill

The student that I am working with does not always display appropriate play behavior. He prefers to parallel play and recently he has been wanting to play and interact more with his classmates.His requests to participate do not always follow classroom procedures and he does not verbally request a turn in order to participate in small or large group activities.

In order to address this social skill I am going to create a PowerPoint presentation that is called, "I Can Play with My Friends." I have taken pictures of my focus child and his classmates to use in this story.  The purpose of the social story is to teach him to ask his friends, "Can I play with you?" when he is wanting to join an activity or game.


I hope it is something that will work for him. I am going to provide his parents with a copy of the story to help him prepare for Kindergarten.