Where's the line?

One of the things that I find most difficult about my job is drawing the line between early intervention teacher and social worker. Many of the families that I have served over the past few years face challenges beyond their child's delays or diagnosis. Some homes that I enter, I leave after ninety plus minutes never even getting a change to talk about their child's development. Now, I know that in order to help the child, I first need to help the family unit because if parents are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, then they are not going to have the energy to provide their child with the best care. However, I struggle with that fine line and with the fact that the whole purpose that I am in the home has been lost. The longer that I am in the field, the better I am getting at navigating and learning about all of the county resources that are available to families. But I still have soooo much to learn in regards to this area.

The End is Near

It is hard to believe that the end of the school year is right around the corner. I feel like there is still so much to wrap up! And even though I work on a stretch calendar, there is something about the end of the school year. Everything seems to calm down and the summer becomes a great time to reorganize myself.

This year has been a year of challenges, changes, and accomplishments both professionally and personally. I feel like I have grown as an early intervention provider this year, more than the last two years combined. I have taken some risks, and colloborated with team members to find the style that not only fits me the best, but also gives my families the fullest from these services. I know that this is only the beginning in regards to tweaking styles, and growing as a teacher, but I feel like I have taken some giant steps in the right direction this year.

I am looking forward to what next year will bring...new families, new expertise, and a fresh beginning.

Year-End Wrap Up!

Looking back over the year, I see how much all our students have grown. They are taller, their faces have changed, they have made new friends and learned how to follow the classroom routine and enjoy trying new things! I have also made progress toward my goals of implementing more technology in the classroom. Even though I have not added new applications for each unit we used throughout the year, balancing life outside of school has a way of slowing down the pace of reaching my goals. The reality of my students needs, and the goals of our program to add more "pre-academic" focus forced me to spend more time on developing strategies to work on vocabulary, receptive and expressive language, social skills, letter recognition and sounds, rhyming, more pre-math skills etc. Professional development does not follow a linear path plotted at the beginning of the year - it takes its own path as needs show themselves throughout the year. These are all areas needing my attention, and will continue to be my focus throughout the next year. This year has been a success - these 3 & 4 year olds are ready to move on to the next challenge - of the approximately 65 students (some added, some dropped) they all can identify more letters and sounds than they could last fall. They all can count more, make comparisons, are learning to recognize rhyming, can complete a pattern. . .have learned some sharing, compassion for others, and most of all - excitement for learning. And the challenges for new learning, adapting and changing continue for me too. New co-teaching, new paras, adding more depth to the curriculum and technology will keep me on my toes next year too.

Phase III Meeting 2 Reflection

Learning is changing. . .

When I completed my licensure, our instruction focused on child development, developmentally appropriate practices, learning through play using all the developmental domains - social/emotional, cognitive, sensory, large and small motor. This foundation has served me well, and as time goes on, we are charged with introducing more "academic" learning - letter identification and sounds, rhyming, number identification, patterning, graphing, etc. My own learning focuses on finding developmentally appropriate ways to teach these concepts throughout our classroom day - as well as focusing on vocabulary development, receptive and expressive language goals for our EL students. Many of the classes I have taken in these areas are targeted for elementary age children, so there is much adaptation (with trial and error) needed to make it effective for my 3 and 4 year old students.

My use of technology in the classroom for the students is increasing - but something I am trying to improve. My struggle remains the fact that our students need so much time to do the sensory, physical, small and large motor work in addition to learning the social skills to succeed in a group that it is hard for me to prioritize computer time for them. I am building up a reportoire of games and activities that work on the skills in our units, and also making time to use them. I would say that my own use of technology to research topics and find resources online has been much more successful, utilizing part of my prep time 3-4 days a week. Technology is making my circle time and music use much more streamlined and easy to access with less down time for my students since I don't need to set up each song on a separate cd, it is all in my playlist.

In summary, learning is changing. There are always new resources, always new ideas and new goals for students. As we change our methods, we also are learning.

Question of the Day (April)

In March, I started incorporating question of the day. Each day a question is posted and each child answers the question by voting with their name tag. It is a great exercise in receptive language (hearing and understanding the question) expressive language (answering the question appropriately) and when we discuss the question at circle time, we incorporate counting, comparisons, and graphing.

During our unit on planting seeds and gardens, the first question was "Which vegetable is your favorite" - which required interpretatation for many of the preschoolers as "which vegetable do you like". The children were then able to answer fairly easily. The next class, I changed the question to "Which vegetable is your least favorite" or "which one do you NOT like" and it was much more difficult for the students to answer. Many of them wanted to answer the vegetable that they did like, and even with one on one discussion, wanted to answer the question the same as the previous class period. This was very interesting to me, since preschoolers are usually very "un-filtered" about things they do and don't like, but presenting the question in this manner was very confusing to them. This is definitely a new concept to many of them, and one that I will make sure to incorporate into our work going forward.

Music high and low tech! (March)

So a portion of my goal to incorporate more technology into the classroom included working with my i-pod touch to compile all of my classroom music and utilize it with my students. I finally accomplished getting my music on the i-pod in December, and have been using it occasionally (some of the songs I prefer to do acapella so I can stop and start - adding narration about the words we're singing, or asking for student participation - or extra time for actions). Though I had compiled all the music, I tended to not use the i-pod because it took so long for me to find what I needed. In March, I was able to take time to create playlists for our units. Now I have the specific songs I want for each unit at my fingertips, and it truly has made music and circle time move much more smoothly. Along with old favorites, I have also added new songs to my reportoire through a few i-tunes purchases.
Another key goal with my students is to have props for the music. Some old favorites have felt board pieces or magnets, but with my large number of English learners, I hope to continue adding more props to help solidify the vocabulary and language they are learning through song. As I added new songs to my i-pod, I was able to make a couple song books with illustrations to use when we are singing, as well as some picture props to use on my easel with clip art and computer illustrations. These have helped our students learn the songs more quickly and master new vocabulary as well.
One of our key literacy goals for our 3 and year olds is learning their name - recognizing it, writing it, and identifying the letters in their name. At mid-year, we start having them "sign in" when they come to class. Their name printed in a dot-to-dot format is on their nametag, and they trace it with a dry erase marker each day. We do name games and songs during circle time, and I wanted to offer another opportunity to practice matching the letters of their names. I created a "name" game on Excel with the letters of their name - a template and empty squares underneath and the letters of their name to cut apart - to identify and match the letters for all 65 students. It was a great game to play at school, and then they were able to take it home to continue practicing.

Assessment (February)

February is often consumed with the frenzy of completing assessments and prepping for conferences. We use the Work Sampling assessment tool, which looks at the domains of personal and social development, language and literacy, mathematical thinking, science, social studies, arts and physical development and health. This year we piloted a new format with an expanded assessment form coupled with data compilation so we can better track our students' progress throughout the year. The new format took some getting used to, seeming more time intensive and cumbersome, while assessing all the same skills as in previous years. This expansion of the form made it unsuitable as a conference tool, so I decided I needed to develop something to compile all the data from the assessments and my class skills checklists to share with parents. Last year I worked on a narrative form that I used for anecdotal comments for each student for each of the domains, but it was very much a duplication of my efforts to fill out the assessment forms and then restate that information on the narrative form, becoming very time and handwriting intensive. After a couple prototypes, my new form is Excel based and on one page combines my skills checklists with space for anecdotes for both fall and spring data. Using my flash drive, I am able to work at school or at home and print out completed conference forms for both the parents and student files. Now that I have developed the form, it is very quick for me to refer to the class checklists and individual assessment forms and compile the conference data in a meaningful way for parents.