Chapters 4 &5

This week in the material I found that the activity where we had the five different simulations to do really helped me see what some children with special needs go through. I think that a lot of times it is really hard to understand what the kids go through and how hard simple tasks can be. The simulation I had the hardest time with was the attention one where we were supposed to place the animal cards where the teacher was telling us, while all around there were many noises that distracted me. These noises became so loud that I could not hear hardly anything the teacher was saying, and I lost interest really fast. I actually ended up not moving half of the animal cards because I could not hear the teacher anyways, so I just gave up. This really put things into perspective for me. As a special educator I am going to have kids that will do the same thing I just did. They won't quit working just because they don't feel like doing the work; they will quit because they are frustrated and getting a sense of what it feels like really opened my eyes. We need to remember that these kids will try and work hard but sometimes it is just impossible under certain circumstances.

When we made the concept map with our heterogeneous groups it really helped me to remember the things from the text. Going over the INCLUDE steps helped me remember a lot better than I would have on my own. Many groups covered the same things, but the repetitiveness definitely helped it to stick in my head. My homogeneous group also got together to study for our exam. We did a lot of review on the cases, making sure we knew which cases went with each IDEA principle. This helped me a ton because I had a hard time remembering all the cases.

Studying for the exam took up a lot of my time this week because I want to make sure I know the material. We talk in class a lot about how important it is to really know and understand the stuff we are learning and I want to do that. When I am a teacher and working with special needs and IEP's and things like that I need to know what the parts are and how everything connects together. I have really liked connecting the cases to the different IDEA principles because it makes the principles stand out more to me. When I have examples to go off of, I can remember all the parts of the principle.

One thing I loved from our reading this week was the classroom organization section. When I read this, it definitely made sense to me because when my room is dark or cluttered I have a hard time being in it and I have to let in the light and clean it up. I focus so much better when things are organized and there is lots of light. It just makes sense that kids function better this way too. As a future educator it is important to remember these little things so that my classroom can function in a way that is best for everyone that is in them.