The Joseph Robert Shaw Foundation

Helping Children Recover from Brain Injury

Creating Units for Our Inclusive Group

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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!

When Collaboration Makes Us Stronger

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On Friday mornings a team of us meets over Zoom to plan for our inclusive pod and discuss any other concerns or pressing issues. As Thanksgiving approached we’d talked about how we wanted to do a project that dealt with thankfulness, but hadn’t found one yet.

The day before we met I spent time pursuing Pinterest for some of those beautiful crafty projects teachers post about doing for Thanksgiving. I found one from a Montessori teacher who had her children sew small hearts to give away at Thanksgiving dinner. Well, that sounded sweet and I couldn’t think of anything better. Instead of handing them out at Thanksgiving we could mail them to people we can’t be with this year.

I brought the idea to our Friday morning group. One of our members, a special education professor, immediately started planning how to adapt it for Joey. Use a bigger, plastic needle – she suggested – and maybe burlap for Joey so that the needle will go through.

And then, as we talked, we all realized – why should Joey be the only one with a large plastic needle making burlap hearts? Why should he be different?

 

We ordered a pack of plastic needles, red yarn, and a roll of burlap and changed our plan from Joey being the only one using adapted materials to everyone using the same materials. 

The project was a success- the burlap hearts came out surprisingly well (I had to beg my daughters to make some for our own house!) and Joey got into the task of pulling the needle with yarn through the burlap. With help of placing the needle back through the burlap, Joey could access the project and he ended up with the same sweet burlap hearts as everyone else.

This project was a great reminder of two important elements in inclusion – 

  1. The importance of collaboration and working together – no one special education teacher can produce and plan a project alone. The brainstorming – especially involving different disciplines – will always make a project stronger. In my quick search I honestly had not made that next step into how to adapt the project – I was just looking to find something. Thank goodness our professor stepped in immediately with adaptive suggestions!
  2. When we think about an inclusive community we need to remember to not just think about adaptations just for the child who needs it changed. Sometimes everyone benefits from the adaptations – and other times the community benefits from everyone working on the same project. Joey did not need to have a different product in this case – the supports for him were also supports for everyone. 

Introducing the ALPS Players – and Our First Readers’ Theater Performance!

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Our Augmentative Learning Program Study (ALPS) performed their first Readers’ Theater! 

This was certainly a labor of love for our group, as the students were required to produce every part of this performance – from writing the script to making the costumes. 

What I love about readers’ theater, or putting on plays with children in general is that it is a medium that naturally lends itself to differentiation. As I shared earlier, my hope for this group is to follow inclusion advocate Shelly Moore’s teaching is like bowling philosophy. If you focus on hitting the 7th and 10th pin instead of simply rolling the ball down the middle of the lane, you are more likely to knock down all the pins – or reach all the learners. When we only plan to teach the children in the middle – or to hit the middle pins – we are more likely to leave out the students that stand out on either side. 

And so – our Little Red Hen unit was carefully planned to reach the learners on either side of the lane, knowing that this way we would meet everyone’s needs.

Our third graders wrote the play, using a variety of Little Red Hen books as models. They adapted the story to fit the needs of the group – allowing for AAC users to star in the show, writing in a non-speaking support buddy as a natural part of the play, and thinking through other access issues. They added their own third-grade twist to it, bringing in a T-Rex to steal all the brownies. None of these boring “who will help me?” storylines – they even wrote in a fight-scene between the T-Rex and Little Red. 

Those who wanted to were able to memorize their lines, while others were able to practice repeating readings of their lines. Joey’s lines were on his AAC device

(he did end up with almost the most lines), but a last minute switch was made to have him use a big-mac button with his brother’s voice recorded with the lines. Each child worked on their own goals during this – memorizing, speaking out, reading repeated lines, attending to cues, and monitoring social-cues for the right turn to speak. 

The children even made their own costumes as well as baked the brownies (clever students realized that Little Red made brownies instead of bread then the cast could eat the brownies at the cast party.) 

Projects like this one let us challenge each learner where they are while building community and a sense of ownership in our work. I’m looking forward to more projects like this, where each of our students is able to shine and grow while working together.

Opening the Doors of Our Augmented Learning Program Pod

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Our Inclusive AAC Learning Group officially began September 14, 2020. After what somehow felt both like months of planning and yet still not enough time to be ready, we opened our group to a small but eager group of first through third grade students on Monday afternoon. We are looking forward to welcoming more students, but are taking advantage of the small group to find our sea legs and develop our rhythm.

When we first started dreaming about this group our main vision was to provide students who use AAC devices a community, increase their AAC skills, as well as giving them opportunities for more direct learning in math and reading alongside their peers. From that large vision the group felt like a blank slate, with the opportunity to do pretty much anything that we think would benefit the academic and ccommunication of the students in the group.

So where to start?

I cannot think of inclusion without thinking about Shelly Moore’s bowling video.

Take a moment and watch it. Once you watch it you cannot unsee it. I want our group to plan for the hardest to hit pins (watch the video) in thehopes that we will knock down everything in between.

We want this group to reach all students – proving Joey and students like him with opportunities for problem-based learning and higher level thinking while also practicing their academic and communication skills. So how do we do that? Can we do that? 


Our plan is to structure the two hour sessions as one would an advanced academic or “gifted” classroom – with a whole group meeting that discusses a broader question or debate, and then small group opportunities to further dive into topics and practice specific skills. The small groups will reunite to share what they worked on, problem solve ideas, and learn from each other.

 

We are going to spend the year researching the answer to one question – what is community? We will use everything we learn throughout the year – from stories in picture books to what we learn about our American history and ancient civilizations – to answer this question and watch our knowledge grow. My hope through this process is that we engage all the students in deeper thinking and understand that everything we learn can help us answer broader life questions.

On the opening day we began by asking the students to share what they know about the concept of community. We recorded their thoughts and looked at where we could find the community vocabulary on Joey’s device. Everyone got to take a turn using the device to find the words and answer questions about when they grow up. As we learned how to navigate Joey’s device it became clear to the students just how much time it takes for Joey to select one word. 

In these first few weeks we are just getting to know how this group works together so that we can figure out our pacing. We want Joey to have enough time to share and find his words, while also making sure we keep the others engaged. We foresee doing this through project-based learning, small groups, and open-ended games and activities. Although we have so many ideas and plans right now, we are trying to let the students lead the group. To make this successful we need to find our rhythm together so that it is truly an inclusive community based around the needs of the students in front of us – not our needs as the adults in the room. 

Saturday Serenade

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Test post for Saturday Serenades https://www.musichealsglennjan.com/saturday-serenades

Bitnami