First Semester Adventures with John

I really struggled with this topic. I know I talked about how my job description completely changed at the beginning of the year when I was asked to work 1 on 1 with a new kindergarten student at my school.  To be completely honest it was rough. We had consistant really bad days. I worked with him everyday for 5 weeks, and then when almost at my breakin point we finally got some input from the invisble people who make the decisions.

John was given a behavior evaluation, an ocupational therapy evaluation, and several other tests to determine the best way to work with him. You see, he has a severe case of undiagnosed autsim. He has a brother with Autism, however they are complete opposites. His brother, let's call him Dave, is very high functioning, even plays in the middle school band. I wish I could say that John is just as high functioning.

Throughout the course of this first half of school, John has made so much improvement! He talks now, although it is still very small bits ( 2-3 word phrases), he can sit down and work on academic and life skills without screaming, hitting, or spitting at you for asking and making him do so. Once we got to this point we began working on other skills, social skills. he can now go outside and play with his typicall, as we now call it" classmates as well as participate to a degree in Science/Social Studies learning time.

Then the day came when it was decided that John should start the transition to his permanent classroom setting, the non-typicall room. He started with an hour and a half per day and now wer are at half a day. This has caused some regression in his behaviors. He has started to hit and scream again, but these are things we expected and he is learning to cope with being in a different setting for the THIRD time this school year.

We did have a big celebration today with John. He is extremely sensitive to loud noises and use to refuse to walk into the school gym. This is something that we have been slowly working on. We take him to the gym before going outside to recess and he has to just walk from the inside entrance to the gym to the outside door. It's about 10 steps. This was going really well, and his behavior aide decided it was time we tried a school assembly to see how he managed. We had a school assembly today in which students who participated in our Fally Fundraiser got to dump ice cream on the principal. When classes were dismissed to the gym, we waited until most of the school had gone and then we walked John down to the gym. Once we got to the door we placed headphones ( which he had previously decided he didn't like and would take off and throw on the ground) on his head. He walked rigth into the gym with us, never bothering to take the headphones off and guess what? He sat down in his behavior aides lap and watched the entire assembly. All 48 minutes of it! We were so thrilled.

John is making great progress, and he will be in his non-typicall classroom full time starting in January. I have learned so much in the behavior area of Autism from working with him that I am forever changed. I can not wait to see what the future holds for him and for me.

The Rosie Project Part 2

Ok, so I know how much I loved this book when I first did a review on it. It is so amazing. I have learned so much about genetics while reading this book. I know this is a science blog, and I was so excited to learn more about this side of science. Like, if you have blue eyes and your partner has brown eyes you can't have a baby with green eyes.

I highly recommend this book. It is a very easy read and the ending is not what you would expect at all.

You can find it on Amazon here.

Rocks, Rocks, and More Rocks!

Our second graders were busy learning about rocks. They have gone over the types of rocks and their attributes. I have a friend who in 6th grade made a sandwich with peanut butter, jelly, goldfish, and bread. They talked about how rocks are in layers and they made layers with their sandwich materials. I loved getting to hear about the hands-on approach to learning about the layers of rock, however I just don't know that I could eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with goldfish on it. 😝

Here are a few more links to other ways to teach about rocks:

http://www.watchknowlearn.org/Category.aspx?CategoryID=4761

http://www.science-fest.org/Rock%20On!%20--%20Final%20Edition%20-%20Debbie%20Cubillos.pdf

STEM in the elementary classroom

When I was student teaching at Hobgood they had a Related Arts class that was STEM. The students got to go to a computer lab where they would explore technology and topics such as geography, math, and science. The students really loved this class and often asked if they were going there that day.

I wonder what this would look like in a general education classroom. Well, I looked up a website that tells all about STEM and even gives examples. I really enjoyed reading this web page. The author states that you can incorporate STEM into your classroom with little change to what you currently are doing.

Check out the link for more information!

STEM: It's Elementary!

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

I was given this book by Dr. Bass. It is about a genetics professor who has decided that he is going to look for a wife. He comes up with a scientific way to reduce the number of women that could be a potential wife for himself. The dubs it The Wife Project. Over the course of time, the professor creates a questionaire that the women have to fill out. His best friend takes the, well over 100 questionaires, and then sends one woman to him. They go on to create the Father Project, in which they seek to find Rosie's father.

While I haven't completed the book just yet, it is obvious that the professor has some sort of medical condition that he is unaware of currently. My guess would be Aspergers Syndrom, but I am definately not qualified to say for sure, and it is just a book.

I highly suggest reading this book, even though Dr. Bass was informed that it is a teen novel. :) I can't wait to see where this book goes, and I was truely impressed with the scientic data and vocabulary that is in this book.

Do you wanna build an...atom?

Ok, I really enjoyed our class presentations today and getting to see how everyone rebuilt their lessons. I really liked the idea of having students build atoms out of edible materials. They have a project to work towards and in the end they can choose to save it or eat it! Not knowing what grade level we will be teaching in our first year of teaching, means that we need to have creative teaching methods, such as this, for the future.

Science Fairs

I saw this post on Facebook the other day about how much parents dislike Science Fair projects, because they end up doing all of the work. When I told my mom that I was doing a Science Fair in class her response was, "What do I need to do?" I find it extremely interesting that parents feel the need to complete said projects for their students instead of simply helping their student come up with a topic and guiding them through the process.  Here is the picture that I saw and the mother's (Susan) explanation of why she made this board can be found here.

So for those of you that plan on doing a Science Fair in your classroom or maybe even one at your school when you get there, check out some of these sites for helpful tips for your parents. The worst thing that you can have beside an unhappy student is an unhappy parent!

http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr220.shtml

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/parents_resourceoverview.shtml

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/sciencefaircentral/?pID=fair