My Experience with Assistive Technology and How I Will Use It in the Future.

A long time ago I used to work at public school as a teacher assistant.  I worked with exceptional children.  Some of them required multiple assistive technologies.  One of my students used to have hearing aids and when he arrived to school, he took them off and put on audio trainer.  Then the deaf child’s teacher put on the microphone to speak to help the child to hear better with a help of little sign language.  The teacher and I developed the cards that had pictures with words on them.  It helped him to point and understand what he was trying to do next.  For example, one of my teachers demonstrated a picture of a kid playing at the playground to a deaf child.  It helped tremendously because deaf people are very visual learners and they rely on what they see.

            In the future, I would like to continue to develop picture cards for children to read and recognize what they see such as picture schedules, word with pictures on multiple objects, and much more.  It would not only help children to recognize, but it would help with developing vocabulary skills, communication skills, sequential skills, and would help them make a connection from the pictures to the objects.  They will develop strong sense of print awareness, concept of book print, story sense, vocabulary development, phonologic awareness, alphabetic understanding, speech/print match, and control of reading and writing (Cook, Klein, & Tessier, p. 320-321).  When they grow older, they will develop a strong literacy skills as well.      

Reference:

Cook, R.E.,M.D. &Tessier, A. (2008).  Adapting early childhood curricula for children with Special Needs (7^th Ed).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall

Task Analysis

            Task Analysis of adaptive skills is the process of breaking down a skill area into its component parts (Cook, Klein, & Tessier, p. 239).  My choice on task analysis was to cut with the scissor.  I know that I was using this task for my focus child.  However, I believe that task analysis can work for every child whether they have disabilities or not.  I devised  task cards with pictures to help the children to read the words and look at the pictures to make the connections.  I am a firm believer that my focus child who has a poor fine motor skill would be very accommodated for having the task cards to follow through. 

            My task cards were showing the every step from the beginning to the ending with pictures demonstrating:

1.         Grab the scissors.

2.                  Pick up a piece of construction paper.

3.                  Insert your thumb into the big hole.

4.                  Insert your fingers into the crescent shaped hole.

5.                  Push the scissors as you open and close the scissor.

6.                  Place the scissor back on the shelf.

Reference:

Cook, R.E.,M.D. &Tessier, A. (2008).  Adapting early childhood curricula for children with Special Needs (7^th Ed).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall

Communication Skills

            My focus child has multiple delays and disabilities.  His communication skills is one of the delays he has.  He demonstrated the ability to communicate using words, phrases, and some simple sentences up to 5 to 6 words in length. When he talks he lacks verb endings such as –ing, and eliminates some verbs.   When asking a question instead of saying “Is that my corn?”  He would say “That my corn?”  Another example is when he said “You leave?”  instead of “Are you leaving?”  He tends to miss a lot of verb usage and tense  in each sentence when he talks with anyone.  He has not developed the concept of “Yesterday/today, before/after, and more/less when he communicates with his friends or teachers.  In other words, he needs to enhance his overall receptive and expressive language skills while communicating with others.  He will need to learn how to develop narrative forms, which means stories or explanations that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, (Cook, Klein, and Tessier, p. 261). He is also greatly impacted by his delayed social skills which limits his successes in communicating effectively with others.        

            My approach to enhance his communication strategies would be to walk along with my focus child and encourage him to meet someone and communicate.  I could model for him how to talk based on what he needs from other people or begin modeling basic conversational interactions.  If all the therapist and teachers that work with this child daily encourage and require conversation he will be able to improve his ability to use language more comfortably.  Communicating his wants and needs will be the starting point for out interactions and behavior modeling.

Reference:

Cook, R.E.,M.D. &Tessier, A. (2008).  Adapting early childhood curricula for children with Special Needs (7^th Ed).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall

My Focus Child’s Motor and Self Help Skills

            My focus child has a developmental delay in motor skills.  The delay is in his fine motor skills and he needs to keep working on cutting with scissors, using pencils with a three pinch finger position and he also has mild difficulty using small materials to manipulate. He is able to pick up pencils, crayons, and marker with his hands but could not handle them appropriately in writing and drawing. 

            I learned that “Most fine motor skills, as far as reparation for manual control is concerned, involve hands and fingers” (Cook, Klein, Tessier p. 223).  I knew from the beginning that he has demonstrated fine motor skill problems.  So I discussed with my focus child’s teacher and came up a plan to improve his fine motor skills by providing several papers with lines to cut and the next time I will bring a similar activity except I added simple shapes such as square, triangle, and rectangle to give him a little challenge and develop mathematical concepts.  I am looking for how much improvement he will get by the end of this semester because he has improved since Mid January. 

 Reference:

Cook, R.E., Klein, M.D. & Tessier, A. (2008). Adapting early childhood curricula for children with Special Needs (7^th Ed).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall.

Social Story- Solitary independent play/ turn taking issue.

Social Stories are great implements for helping children.  My focus child has several disabilities and issues such as ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  The story I was telling him encourages him to develop a relationship with other children.

            He has no ability to interact with others because he is totally focused on his on tasks.  However, he also bounces one center t the next for most of center time.  My focus child will begin to play with a toy phone and put it down and walk away after a short time, when his happens another child will pick it up and begin to play with it.  Once my focus child notices someone else has the phone he will begin screaming and screaming.  He walked toward the other child and grabbed it to yank it away but the other child kept holding it even harder.  I stepped in and told my focus child and the other child about “Taking turns”

One kid loved to play basketball.  He was shooting the ball into the goal and made it several times for days.  One day, a child shot the ball and missed the goal.  Another child took the ball and the first child screamed “Hey that is my ball!”  The angry child tried to snatch the ball back but the other child was defending himself by keeping the ball.   The teacher walked into an angry child and the ball snatcher.  The teacher was guiding them by thinking about what can they do to work out the situation.  The children thought about the problem and then the ball snatcher had an idea and told him that he would shot the ball and the angry child while take the ball and shoot also.  “We can take turns!!”  The teacher commended them for working the situation out.

            So my focus child decided to tell him he could have the phone and when he was done then he can have the phone back.  They learned how to take turns and share the phone.  I told them that it was okay to be angry but it was not necessary to shout or be rude to each other.  You must recognize the problem, admit it, and remain calm at all times.    

How Goals of Focus Child Will Be Embedded into Activities?

First thing I would do is to understand the strengths and weakness in the child.  Then I would develop a goal and break it down into several smaller objectives to help the child to take steps to reach the year long realistic goal. 

            I believe that interventions should be embedded within the daily activities and routines (cook, 2008).  That means that no matter what we, as the teachers, want to teach we must focus on individual strengths and needs.  Everyone has different ways of learning and we have different ways of teaching also.  It is important to understand the child’s needs and how we can help the child to success with extra help. 

            When planning classroom activities it is important to think of the individual needs of each child and make sure you have addressed them with classroom activities and daily plan.  Allowing the child to work on goals during classroom activities instead of being pulled to the side will give them better opportunities to learn from their peers and mainstream into the general education setting. 

            Motivation is the one of the keys to help children have the drive to learn, but they may have mental blockages so we have to use IEP method to break through to their minds.  That way they can open their minds like we open the flood gate to learning.      

Reference:

Cook, R.E., Klein, M.D. & Tessier, A. (2008). Adapting early childhood curricula for children with Special Needs (7^th Ed).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall.

Importance collection progress on IEP Goals

           I strongly believe that using progress monitoring gives strong support for IEP goals.  It gives observers an idea of what level the child is and how much he has accomplished and the observers will be aware of what to develop the next goals in the IEP.  Monitoring Progress is meant to track down what the individual is doing during the ongoing time frame.

            As  professionals know that the IEP documents are only good for one year and they will need to be recreate the goals or expand if the majority of the goals have not been accomplished. The monitoring of progress is meant to collect data to show evidence for parents and other professionals of the ongoing progress to be shared. 

It is important to use progress monitoring because the child may be constantly changing goals if he or she reaches the goal much quicker than a year.  So if that happens, then the IEP team must develop new goals and objectives to make further progress in order to close the gap with typical students’ levels.    

            Progress Monitoring helps keep instruction on track for the individual child and it has abundant amount information to use for writing the IEP document.  It also would make sure that teachers will know where the weakness are and helps guide the next step of instruction to meet the ongoing goals of the IEP.