Week of September 22-26

Monday, September 22, 2014: Mindy Duckworth on Special Education:

 "...each student is a unique creation...a person who has a different set of talents, intelligences and ways of learning."

 

Today in Teacher Cadets, we began our unit on special education and we had the honor of having guest speaker Mindy Duckworth. Mrs. Duckworth works with accommodating children with special needs in the Greenville County School District. Her presentation was constructed of the important laws, rights, and services offered to children with special needs like the the different classroom types (Itinerant, Resource, Self Contained, and Inclusion), the IEP and the 504. She also explained the different types of disabilities and the certain modifications the school may have to make in order to accommodate that student.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014: Review of Important Information about Special Education:

We reviewed all of the useful information that Mrs. Duckworth gave to us. We reviewed the IEP( Individual Education Plan), the 504 and the different types of classrooms that children with disabilities may be placed in. We also did an activity to help us see what a child with disabilities may see when given an assignment. We each received a piece of paper that had numbers randomly written all over it and we were given 34 seconds to find the numbers in order starting with the number one. After realizing that the task was harder than expected, Mrs. Turner gave us a hint; She told us to fold our papers like a hot dog (vertical) then to fold it like a hamburger ( horizontal). Then she helped us to realize that that the numbers went in order of the quadrants making it easier for us to understand the second time around. We also met Pepe the puppet who would only take certain people with him on his Picnic. Mrs. Turner finally tells us that he only accepted people who were bringing things that started with the same letter as their first name. The whole point of this experience was to show that some people get concepts easily in class while others don’t get it as quickly and become frustrated.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014: Autism Special 

Today we watched a video on Autism from Hope Academy to give us some more information on Autism.

Thursday, September 25,2014: Susan Sachs from Hope Academy: 

Today we had our guest speaker Susan Sachs from Hope Academy who spoke about Autism and showed us examples of common things that children with Autism may do like:  using other peoples hands to point and throwing tantrums in order to gain what they seek because they may not be able to speak. Miss Sachs also told us more about Hope Academy to prepare us for our observations in the coming week. She told us that there were two types of classrooms: Inclusion where there are 1-3 children with Autism in a typical classroom and smaller classrooms with children that have autism.

We also received awesome bracelets from our guest speaker!

Friday, September 26, 2014: Observations/ Teacher Poster Making

Today some of us went to our observation sites at nearby elementary, middle and high schools and others stayed behind and worked on the posters we are making for our adopted teachers to remind them that they matter!

What a wonderful week in Teacher Cadet!!!