HawkenProjects_2018_Tecson

Early childhood intervention specialists do a lot of different things. But the main part of their job is to help educate and work with kids with special needs. Part of their job is to work with parents to help brainstorm different strategies to help their child based on their disability. Like sometimes a child will have a hard time following directions because of their disability. So a strategy an early childhood intervention specialist would tell a parent is to split up directions into small steps. Like if a child with certain disabilities is told to clean their room, they may have a hard time following that direction because there is a lot of different actions needed to do when cleaning their room. So instead of just telling a child to clean their room, they should split it up and say, "pick up all your dinosaur toys and put them in this bin", and then set up a timer and give them a time limit. These things help the child focus on one thing at a time which will ultimately h...

Going off of my last blog, I talked about the little boy and how I got to witness an evaluation. Usually there are more than one person who does an evaluation of a child, and this was an example of that. My mentor was actually the last person to do an evaluation, and once that was done they were finally able to have the final meeting for that child. Pretty much the parents came into a school to meet with my mentor and another person. They pulled up a giant document on the screen and brought up notes about the child and talked about the child. The main point of this meeting is to go over all the evaluations to understand the conditions of the child and come up with strategies to help the child have the best education experience and to develop. It is important for the early childhood intervention specialists to work together with the parents to help their child succeed. The child comes first before anything, so it's important for the early childhood intervention specialists and the p...

I was able to witness an evaluation of a child from start to finish. The child was a little boy and I was able to go into his house and see him in his home environment. He in my opinion seemed like a very normal child, but he did have a disability. His speech was actually a little behind for a standard child his age, and I kind of noticed that. There would be times where I couldn't understand what he was saying, but for the most part I could understand. He seemed pretty normal in the way he interacted with adults. When we asked him questions he would answer them, and he seemed pretty smart when he explained how some of his toys worked. When we talked to his mom, she helped shed some light on his behavior and how it's not very normal sometimes. It's normal for a child to be curious, but she said that her son would ask a lot of questions, and sometimes they would be questions that aren't very relevant. Like if she asked him to put on his shoes, he would ask questions like...

This blog is going to go off of my last one and talk more about the autism unit at Lander Elementary School. Last time I talked about their work sheet in which it lists the things they need to do before they get rewarded and get to play. It helps them focus on their tasks and complete their work. Having that set schedule in front of them is really important because it helps them focus on what they're doing and help them focus on doing their work. Something else that helps them focus is that when they work, they are by themselves and independent. Other kids can be distracting, so the children sit at their desks by themselves, and the desks are usually distant from the other kids' desks. The teachers also put up cardboard walls to help block the view of other things and students. The children's disability makes it more difficult for them to concentrate, so putting them in a space where it's just themselves and their work helps them work better. Millridge Elementary school...

Over multiple days this week, I've been able to go to Lander Elementary School to see and work with the autism unit there. The autism unit is a classroom of five or six year old children who have some kind of disability, such as autism. They're able to be in school and in a classroom with others, but they're not always able to be in a more traditional classroom with a bunch of kids that do not have a disability. So they learn in the autism unit classroom. There's much less children in this classroom and there are normally a couple more teachers in the room. In this room, the children are able to work more at their pace. Each student has their own schedule of what to do. And it is important that this schedule is illustrated and in front of them. The teachers can put pictures on the Velcro strip creating a schedule for the children. The children look at these pictures and complete the tasks from top to bottom, and when they're done with a task they take the picture of...

There are typically three different learning environments for children with disabilities. There is the least restrictive environment, which is where children with disabilities go to school every day for the whole day like the majority of kids. There is most restrictive where the kids don't come to school and they stay at home.  And then there is something in the middle which is where the children go into school for about half the day. Choosing which one of these environments the children should learn in is dependent mostly on how comfortable the parents feel. The parents know their children the most, so if they don't think they can function in a regular classroom environment with a bunch of other kids, they won't send them to school for the whole day. The goal is to put the child in the least restrictive environment possible. Some kids can only really stay in a classroom and in school for a couple hours, while some kids absolutely can't go to school. Every child is diff...