Week Eleven

As I continue my journey of adjusting to my new, but wonderful classroom I am learning more and more each day. In the past week, I have developed relationships with my students and coworkers. My classroom has two paraprofessionals and one classroom aide. They are all absolutely wonderful! I have appreciated how much support I receive from the support staff and my cooperating teacher. They are always willing to listen to my questions and offer guidance where they see needed.

This week, I observed a lot of behaviors. Several of my students have a primary diagnosis of Autism. With autism comes a lot of anxiety due to schedule changes. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity of watching my teacher work magic in deescalating student’s anxieties and behaviors. I have learned so much about the kinds of redirections that my students respond best to. Most of the class responds well to being prompted to remain flexible. Student will often finish a sentence such as, “We are going to be,” with the word, “flexible.” Praising the students by saying things like, “Great job being flexible.” Also reinforces their flexibility and is an excellent to remind students to be flexible.

I also found myself teaching a lot of impromptu lessons. Because we have two classes, our AM class and our PM class, my teacher modelled teaching the lessons to the AM group and gave the opportunity to teach the same content to the PM group. On Thursday, I got to teach a lesson where students practiced reading schedules. Together, we practiced reading a family weekend schedule. We answered questions that required us to read the schedule and tell time. I was also given the opportunity to introduce a lesson involving a job description to work at the Clothes Barn as a dressing room assistant. I got to talk about the skills needed for the job and the kind of work students would do as a dressing room assistant.

Fridays we go out into the community for community education. This Friday I got to go with my students to the store. The AM class went to the dollar store. We were split into two groups. Each group was given $25 dollars to spend. One group was assigned a little boy between the ages of 5 and 9. The other group was assigned a little girl between the ages of 5 and 9. Each group picked items for their assigned child. We bought items like toys, hygiene products, puzzles, books, or crayons. The items that students bought are going to be put into shoeboxes and sent to Operation Christmas Child. The shoeboxes will be given to children around the world in need.

The PM class went to Wal-Mart to buy the necessary supplies for our cooking class. On Monday, we picked three dishes to make for cooking class. We picked one breakfast, one lunch, and one snack. The students chose to make cinnamon toast for breakfast, macaroni and cheese for lunch, and chocolate croissants for snack. The PM class was divided into two groups each group was given a list of ingredients for our chosen dishes. I learned so much from getting to go shopping with the students.

Classroom Confidential

1.       Social justice is something that all teachers, especially Christian teachers, need to be well educated on. Because we live in a broken world tainted by sin we often encounter issues in the way that people are being treated. As Christians we are called to love and serve everyone. Understanding social justice and social justice reforms as a Christian educator helps me to love my students and serve them. Schmidt argues that students want to discuss social injustices but don’t know how to. They need educated adults to help them learn to talk about social injustices. Teachers are examples love and equality to our students. Students also gain many skills from social justice projects such as: problem solving, critical thinking, persuasive speaking and writing, risk taking, awareness of community needs, and personal convictions. It’s crucial for teachers to know how to facilitate social justice discussions.