Sponsored by Joey’s Foundation, BFit launched its first full year at MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital outpatient site with a mission to empower children with brain injuries through adaptive fitness, wellness education, and peer connection. The program integrates clinical expertise with community-building to support long-term health and independence. [Read more…]
Accepting Change
I’ve been struggling to write this post for the past month and every time I sit down to write nothing comes out. And yet, sometimes we have to write about hard things. So here it goes.
I have worked with Joey since he was two years old. When I began working with him in the summer of 2016 he was not yet using a device, but still loved participating in any learning type of activity. Joey adored books, and the more I connected our work to books and stories the more engaged he became. Even before he had a device to participate with the book he was actively engaged. If I handed him a maraca he could shake it at all the right times for the Pete the Cat stories he loved so much. He knew exactly when his turn to shake the maraca was, and he waited until the right moment in the story. Beyond his bright eyes that could speak directly to anyone he was communicating with, it was his maraca participation that let me see there was a bright and engaged child unable to engage with the world like he wanted.
Some of my work with Joey has felt deeply personal, perhaps because my daughter is only a month younger than him. It’s been so helpful for me to watch their parallel development, and to remind myself of his age-appropriate sense of humor. For four years I watched them grow up in different settings, with different ways to communicate, and yet with similar interests and capabilities that did not involve motor skills.
This fall it was such an honor to bring them together for our inclusive pod and watch them interest – playing math games together, learning alongside of each other, and supporting each other. This fall was a teaching dream.
And yet, my family found our dream house in the blue ridge mountains – a dream my husband and I have had for fifteen years. I was faced with a horribly difficult decision that any teacher will relate to – that moment when you have to face the reality that your students are not your own children, and that sometimes you have to put your own children and family first. It is not something we are good at doing as teachers, and it is not a comfortable or easy decision to make.
We’ve lived here for three weeks now. We eat breakfast watching the sun rise over the mountains and the deer grazing in our field. Thanks to COVID, life is not that different inside of our house than it was before, except, of course, for our inclusive pod and Joey.
We have been able to go back once and work with Joey again. I am pretty sure Joey was happier to see my girls – his peers and friends – than he was to see me, but that is alright. I make him work, and they are there to play. My six year old had brought a Dogman book and Joey (like all six year olds) absolutely lit up when she held it up for him to look at. It was such a reminder of how much time has gone by – how four and half years ago we were reading Pete the Cat and now he’s clearly ready, just like my daughter, to dive into Dav Pilkey’s world.
Joey and I have done so much together. We learned the alphabet, the sounds, high frequency words, and then put all of it together to read actual books where Joey is able to read the sentence silently to himself and select the picture that matches the text. We’ve gone from numeral identification to counting sets, adding sets together, and recognizing and counting money.
I do not think there will be a day that goes by where I look out over the mountains and think of Joey. Yet, four and a half years is a long time to work with one teacher, and while I would love to continue working with Joey, he will continue to grow by being exposed to new teachers, strategies, and different learning opportunities. Joey is ready to expand his learning beyond me and see where it takes him next. I cannot wait to see where his childhood will take him.
I hope to continue to work with Joey in any capacity possible from a distance, or by coming back on a semi-regular basis. But if I cannot, I know Joey will continue to thrive with the excellent team and the incredible support of his family.
Be Kind and Silly – Our Students’ Inclusive Message
For our last inclusive pod project of 2020 we let the third graders write their own version of the traditional tale, Stone Soup.
Spoiler alert: It barely involves a stone and even if you squint your eyes it does not really follow the Stone Soup narrative arch.
In this tale, an FBI Agent/British Investigator comes back to his old town to visit the restaurant where he used to work, run by the Carrot Brothers. These are played by actual carrots with faces drawn on them. One version of the Carrot Brothers included clothes, but those carrots began to rot before filming began. On his return from his FBI/ British Investigator work he is met by the rude Chugga Chugga Choo Choo family who promptly tells him to get out of town and calls him rude names like Hobo Pants. The family includes Mama, who is also a Detective/Night Watch-woman, a brother named Chubs McNubs, a sister, a father, and two birds who are just as rude as the rest of the family.
Instead of getting upset by the negative reaction to his return, the FBI Agent invites the family to the town square to make magic Stone Mac and Cheese with him. He ignores their taunts and continues to offer kindness and love among the worst insults the third grade writing team could come up with.
The rude family shows up at town square announcing they only came for the free food and that this is going to be a terrible party. Everyone contributes ingredients to the pot (there never is a stone added). The success and fun of the party causes the family to admit that they have never been to a party before, and maybe that’s why they are so rude. They apologize for how they acted now that they see the error of their ways and the benefits of kindness. In the end, our star FBI Agent/British Investigator provides them with The Book of Kindness, or rather, the “how to be nice manual” so that the family will not make the same rude mistake again.
Our students were in charge of doing everything themselves – making the sets, costumes, and writing and revising the scripts. I stayed out of it as much as I could, wanting this to be a project owned from start to finish by the students.
When the book of “How to be Nice” came up I did not commit other than to say I loved the idea. I offered no other suggestions. The boy in charge of this went to each participant and asked them to include a recommendation for the book. For Joey, we offered four suggestions he could choose from so that he was included in the book as well. He chose “Look at people when they enter the room”, which is something he is very good at doing.
The play was, of course, exactly as ridiculous as expected. And yet, even the silliness said so much about this group and how they’ve come together. After three months of working together in an inclusive setting and doing a deep dive into what it means to be a community, these students had a message for the world – be kind to everyone, even if they aren’t kind to you. Include everyone, even if they do not include you. And in the end, you never know who may change their ways. I could have made it a more coherent play, but then it would not have been their message and their creation. I never would have had the family be that mean, the carrots that silly. But I also never would have created the Book of Kindness. The message would not have been as strong or as true.
So, from our ALPS Players to you – be kind to everyone, include everyone – even if they are first mean to you. Follow the golden rule and treat others the way you want to be treated. Wave at people even when you don’t feel like it. Say nice things about people. And look at people when they walk into the room.
Learning the Coins (and about each other)
As a part of our schedule in our inclusive pod, we begin each session with a group meeting where we review the day’s message, talk about the date, and review our plans for the day. At the end of this meeting I give each grade level a math challenge based on what we are learning. Right now, the first graders are working on identifying coins, so we’ve been counting coins. The third graders have to count a mix of change, tell me the amount and also identify how much more money they need until they get to one dollar. The first graders have to count one group of coins (pennies, nickels, dimes – not mixed) and tell me how much there is.
On Saturday morning the assignment was for the first graders to count four nickels and tell us how many cents they had. The first step, of course, to counting nickels, is to identify how much a nickel is worth. Now, when you are in first grade and learning the names of coins it can be hard to keep up with the name and the value – they are all relatively small, almost all the same color, have dead white men on them that all look slightly the same. It comes with repetition and practice, but rarely does a child automatically know it. And since we so rarely use coins anymore the challenge for first graders in 2020 is even harder (the national coin shortage isn’t helping matters!) Anyway, I taught first grade for years and I expect this to take a bit of repetition. So when I asked the group “How much is a nickel worth, 5 or 10 cents?” and held out the numbers 5 and 10 for Joey to choose from, I wasn’t surprised when I heard a first grade voice say “10” while Joey hit the number 5. The incorrect first grader starred at Joey and I couldn’t help but feel a bit vindicated for Joey. It was awesome to see him be correct while a bright, typically developing child was still working on the concept. While he often knows the correct answer, because his device is difficult to use, it can take time to answer a question. When the group is impatient someone inevitably whispers the correct answer before Joey can answer. Yet not today. Joey was correct first.
Of course, we didn’t dwell on it, but did note that Joey has been working hard on his coins and that learning coins takes practice. And while Joey has been working hard on them, I wasn’t surprised that he remembered it so quickly. Joey often seems to have a strong memory for these facts, and although it is not easy for him to orally tell us what he knows, he often is able to show it through selecting answers and gesturing.
It was a great reminder to all of us – especially the other children – that Joey is a first grader just like them, not just learning the same information and working on the same concepts, but achieving at these concepts as well.
Creating Units for Our Inclusive Group
As our inclusive pod goes on I continue to contribute much of the success to the theory that if you plan for the students on the two extremes of your group – those who may need the more intensive support and those who may need extensions, then in the end you will have reached everyone’s needs, including the students falling in the middle.
One aspect that allows us to do that is our unit planning. Our year long study is around the concept of community – what is a community, who makes up a community, and what does a community do. While this concept seems simple on the outside, each unit we have done has taken us further into answering this question.
To date, our units have included following traditional stories such as the Little Red Hen and Stone Soup, looking to solve a community problem such as how to move halloween candy from a safe six foot distance, an all about me unit (the individuals within a community), an election unit (how communities make collective decisions) and a unit around the communities of the pilgrims and Wampanoag from the first Thanksgiving. While not every individual lesson within reading and math assignments corresponds with the broader unit we are studying at the time, the main project or focus for each day does. This allows us to get creative with how to fit students’ individual needs into the lessons.
In our current Stone Soup unit we read multiple examples of the stone soup story. We then made our own stone soup one Saturday, which allows the students to chop (with a child-friendly knife), stir, measure, and mix the soup together. Broader activities like cooking give us opportunities for each child to get involved in their own way – whether it is estimating how much of a certain vegetable we need, doing the fraction math for measuring spices – (how many 1/4s do we need to make 3/4s?), or simply using fine motor skills to stir and pour. Better yet, these opportunities are part of building our own community – we are living what we study and working together to create a final product we will all enjoy.
Our third grader writers are currently working on their own version of the Stone Soup script and the rest of us will be creating our costumes and practicing our lines shortly. Again, this unit planning allows us to meet everyone’s needs – whether through creative writing, practice reading, or working on problem solving and flexibility while planning the sets.
Within each unit we work to identify the goal for the different students groups – what is our focus for the third graders? First graders? What is our communication goal? What similarities do we have between these goals? Is this something we can discuss in our group meeting? For both our election and Thanksgiving unit we included map skills, with different goals and questions planned for each of the different groups. Although the whole group may gather around a map, the questions are intentionally tiered for both third and first grade so that everyone is participating in the conversation. You never know when a first grader picks up on the greater concept, or the third grader benefits from the first grade review.
I am looking forward to watching our Stone Soup unit wrap up with another play and moving into a giving back to our community unit. Stay tuned for more work from our inclusive group of kids!
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