Reach 111 Session #3 article

I chose to read the article about ADHD and ADD since I have two students who have been medically diagnosed recently with each of these. One comment that I found particularly interesting in the article,"A New Approach to Attention Deficit Disorder" is the following: " ADD is not a problem of willpower, however. It is a chronic impairment in the chemistry of the management system of the brain." As a teacher who has been in classrooms for many years, I have had students every year who are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD. Some are more severe cases than others and have tested by patience as a teacher. I have been caught up with that same thought that if you can do it behave or be on tast sometimes then why can't you do it all the time? This actually brings me back to a training that I had when I worked in San Jose Unified. We had one whole day's worth of training on ADHD and ADD and one of the issues raised was that teacher's get baffled and frustrated by the simple fact that we see on occasion students with ADD or ADHD perform tasks perfectly and then become confused when they fall back into their not being able to organize, prioritize, focus, sustain effort and manage their emotions. If you can do it once why can't you do it all the time? What is important here is to remember exactly what this quote says which is it is an impairment due to chemicals in the brain that are not being received or delivered to a specific area of the brain. The article stresses that medication for the treatment of ADD/ADHD will not cure it but can be looked at like a pair of glasses to correct the visually impaired individual. It will alleviate those symptoms for the hours of the day that the medication is active in the brain. Since the most recent students to have been diagnosed with ADHD and ADD this year, only one is one medication. She seems to be focusing a lot more and I have noticed a significant improvement in her attention in class. However, the other student's parent put him on medication for one day and decided that she did not like how it effected L, so she stopped giving him his medication. I can respect that decision although I do not understand it because I as a parent would want to try anything that would help my child to do her best and be successful. It seems that one day was not enough time to determine what effects the medication would clearly have on L, so this article is a good reminder that medication although one of the ways to help manage ADD/ADHD still the student needs accomodations. I completely agree that early identification of ADD/ADHD is so critical because if left untouched a student can "become demoralized by repeated experiences of frustration or failure." Finally, there are a lot of myths out there regarding ADD/ADHD, and it is important for me as a classroom teacher to be aware of them and educate myself on what it is exactly and the appropriate modifications that I can make in the classroom that will allow a student with ADD/ADHD to thrive at his or her best. What called my attention is that a person with ADD is six times more likely to have another psychiatric or learning disorder than most other people are. ADD usually overlaps wit other disorders. This particular disorder fascinates me, and I want to continue to learn about it and prepare for those students who come to my classroom with the disorder diagnosed already or those who still do not. Statistics say that 7.8% of children in the U.S. ages 4-17 are currently diagnosed with ADD or ADHD which translates into 2 students er class. That is definately a number that wakes me up!!!

Reach 111 Session #2 reading

After some careful thought about the question, I decided that I have a lot of room to grow as a teacher in regard to providing the appropriate differentiation for students with special needs in my classroom. There are several students who I have in all four classes who present some type of differentiated instruction based on some medically diagnosed disorder. I know that I need to provide more organizers and visuals for many of my students. Specifically when it comes to the 10 tactics to foster attention skills, I paid attention to this one because I for sure have had two students this year L and I who have been diagnosed with ADHD and ADD. Having a highly structured class, display of classroom rules, (I have the core values and the creed posted, but I do not have a separate chart for "my classroom rules" I will focus on having one by the beginning of next school year.), daily class schedule is usually written on the white board and the children know the routine math meeting, homework check, time test, lesson, etc. They know which days to expect centers during the week and so on. The article also mentioned training the class on class cues using bells or charts. The use of two desks for these students and making it a positive is definately something that I would love to implement because it just makes sense especially for L who is up and out of his seat constantly. During assessments, I have had to isolate L completely so he can focus at the task at hand and come and check on him every 5 or so minutes to make sure he is on task and not wasting his time unfocused on someone or something else in the classroom. They all have their own "offices" for testing. L and I have their own specific office away from distractions from others. For these students specifically L he needs to have something in hand all the time to manipulate, so I have given him a small white erase board, marker, and eraser for him to use during group instruction. This keeps him focused and participating and really cuts down on his interruptions and outbursts which were a daily occurence throughout the course of the year. Keeping their desks clear is something that I insist on while testing. Of course visually monitoring them. In terms of providing color organizers I suppose that is something that I could implement as well. I really like the idea of using peer buddies which is just a win win situation when dealing with students with special needs.

Reach 112 Calla Handbook Chapter 3 Academic Language

After looking at my first post on this chapter, I decided that my opinions, thoughts, and feelings have not changed much. It is at present however even clearer to me that academic language is something that I need to make sure I'm teaching my first graders. All of my students with the exception of a few are ELL's , and as this chapter points out, academic and social language are two different things. Academic language takes longer to learn and is more difficult than social language. A vast majority of my students have good social language; however, as the chapter points out this is not at all academic language. I think sometimes we as teachers can be fooled into thinking that just because a student can produce language like a native speaker that he or she has the skills in academic language too, and this is not the case. The simple fact that they are functional in social language does not mean that they possess the academic language. Academic language is going to be taught and used in the classroom, and I definately agree that our students will only have that opportunity to learn and practice academic language in the classroom, so we need to make sure that our instruction delivers this because academic language uses both lower-order and higher-order thinking skills and it encompasses everything from the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy to the highest and most sophisticated level of Bloom's Taxonomy.