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.

Training (January)

In January I attended a SMART Board training on using the lesson activity tool kit. Having the dedicated time to focus on learning new tools to use and how to adapt them to make it meaningful for our young students was invaluable. It is very easy to learn a couple different strategies, but finding the time to advance and learn more creative ways to incorporate the technology into our days is a challenge. Since we often use these activities during free play time, my challenge remains trying to facilitate several students using the activity while also keeping the computer from being swarmed by the rest of the class, assuring them that they too will have an opportunity to "play the game". I plan to develop a visual schedule/sign up sheet so that the students can "see" when their turn is coming.
Creating meaningful SMART Board activities for my 3 and 4 year olds challenges me to really examine what skills I am targeting, how to make it a visual, yet text rich activity with labeling to reinforce literacy concepts. Many of the activities in the tool kit are too advanced, requiring too much text and reading to be effective for my students. The games that I have adapted use the hotspots, image match, image arrange, memory, and image sort. With these tools I have been able to make letter and picture matching, story sequencing, vocabulary memory and sorting games.

Finale

Here is my finale post. I have realized that I will be writing a similar goal for myself next year since my position will be changing and I'd like to figure out how to use technology in the birth to three age range in home visits. My goal started out strong this school year and slowly took a back seat to the other important issues that came up throughout the school year. I'm guessing this happens with other teachers as well as we are unable to determine what the school year will bring us when the year begins. When I reflect on this year I'm still happy with what I've accomplished this year, but definitely could have done more and done things differently. I often times hear people talk about what they would do differently the next year. I have been looking at things throughout the school year to make changes for next year, but I won't have that opportunity. Bummer... I had some good ideas:)

Winds of Change...

Change. It's the one thing in education that we can be guaranteed. Most educators would say that change is necessary and inevitable and not all bad. Yet, when it happens to you it stinks. My entire job description has now changed for next year. Don't get me wrong; I'm grateful to have a job next year. That doesn't mean I'm excited for this change. Two years ago I was cut from my previous district due to lack of students in my area. I had to give up my classroom, my students, my team, my families, all of it. I may be staying in the district, but I am giving all of those things up again. For the same reason. Not due to anything within my control. This is frustrating. I have also had a hand in some changes that will happen in our program next year. And I won't be here to see it or utilize them. This stinks too. I am going from a classroom to a cubicle next year. I am going from working with 3-5 year olds in the classroom, to working with families in their homes. This is a lot to deal with emotionally.

I'm grateful that I have a job; I'm struggling with the change.

Technology

One thing that I have been trying to incorporate more into my home visits is technology. There are wonderful tools available to me, and I think that they could be very useful to use with some families. For example, typically I only see mom or dad at a home visit, as the other parent is at work. For these families it might be helpful to bring in the flip camera and videotape a particular exercise or conversation to be shared with the parent who couldn't be there. I feel that especially for the kiddos that have gross motor concerns where we are introducing and suggesting different exercises and activities to try that I feel this would be most useful. The other day I was talking with a mom after her ECFE class and we were discussing some concerns she had with her child's speech. Her child is very shy and will does not say much when I come to visit her. Another teacher that was with us suggested giving mom the flip camera to bring home to videotape her child during a talkative time of the day for her. It was an awesome idea! I hadn't thought about using the flip camera in that way before. I spoke with the mom a couple days later, and she had some videotape ready to share with me the next time I came out. As I continue to work with families and collaborate with other team members, I hope to find more ways to incorporate technology to ensure that I am serving families with all the appropriate resources that I have available to me.

December Recap

How quickly time flies - so here are the highlights! In December our books were Owl Babies and The Gingerbread Man. I developed a Smart Board activity for Owl babies that included size sorting, and opportunities to use the vocabulary for small, medium, and large as well as comparisons for smaller, bigger, biggest, smallest. My students enjoyed matching the owls to the corresponding size nest. For Gingerbread Man, I found some games that included counting, matching cookie halves, and an interactive story decorating the gingerbread man and turning the pages to listen to the story. To round out all of these technology based enrichments, we baked real cookies and ate them for snack. December was a very successful month of finding existing technology and developing my own activities to enhance our curriculum.

Literacy Bags

One of the things that I wanted to do for this school year was to make activities to go along with Literacy bags that the early intervention team had gotten last year. We have received great feedback on the literacy bags from the families that currently use them. I wanted to add to them by giving families other activities to do with their child. My goal is to give ideas for activities to help promote each area of development. I want to give families way to easily incorproate these fun activities into their daily routines. The task is taken longer than I had anitcipated, but once it is complete it will be a wonderful resource to use with the families that we work with. I am very excited to share these with our families when they are complete!

Time to Reboot

With spring on the horizon (yes I know I'm optimistic) I think it's time for me to reboot my goal for technology use. So many things have come up in my work life and personal life that it is easy to get side tracked. In looking at my goal my new focus for the remaining of the year is to really utilize the iTouch I have in my classroom for use with students and not just for the music use. Part of the delay with this is that we have yet to be directed on how to purchase apps through school. I wouldn't mind buying apps on my own, except if my position changes at all and I have to give up the iTouch, I'm essentially giving up that money. Sounds petty I'm sure, but it's not something I can take with my like books, toys, or other materials. There are a lot of free apps, but sometimes they lead you to apps that are more expensive, but look completely worth it for the things our students could do. This leads me to the iPad. I desperately wish that we had a few of these in Early Education. I have a couple of students whose parents have purchased them and I've seen the students demonstrate skills on the iPad that we aren't seeing at school. I also have a student from the high school that comes to consult with my on one of my students. He has downloaded apps onto his iPad for my student to use... and where she can't use the iTouch due to her motor control and the screen being so small, she IS able to use the iPad. One can dream:)

Reconnecting

In January I came back to work after a thirteen week maternity leave. Since coming back to work, I feel that I am constantly playing catch up and trying to reconnect with my families. In Early Intervention, one of the most important pieces to providing our services is making the strong connections with families, and I have to say that is one of my favorite parts about my job. It is amazing to see how each of the kiddos have changed and grown in the last few months. For the first couple weeks, I couldn't stop gushing over how much they had changed and all the new things they were doing. The parent's glowed with excitement and pride! It has been a busy couple months, but I am glad to be back and working with my families.

You Back?

I typically look forward to returning to work from break. This year should have been the same since I had an extended break taking three additional days for my vacation. I returned home to step off of the plane to find out that my cat had health issues, my brother put my car in the ditch resulting in the need of a new radiator, and my dad needed open heart surgery with the week. Ughhh. Normalcy sounded great at work. Only to walk in the next morning to hear that my students had been a wreck without me and one of my coworkers was having health problems of her own. Seriously?! That hour before the kids arrived was rough... and then... one of my more challenging kids got off the bus to see me, run and give me a hug, and somewhat intelligibly say, "you back?!" Oh, the normalcy returns:)

On the technology front I went to another TIES training at their headquarters in St Paul. To anyone that feels that they need assistance or training with any of the technologies... TAKE ADVANTAGE of these. I have gone to about 5 in the last year, and haven't been to one that wasn't worth my time. I now have more and more ideas for the smart board, although some may need to be put on hold until this summer when I can just sit for a week and develop a plethora of games and activities for my students to use next school year. I am definitely not an expert at this yet, and may need to take the same class every once in a while as a refresher since there was so much information, but it was the kick I needed to look forward and be excited about our technologies once again!