Week 2
The teacher honours different ways of learning into the classroom by adapting the activities for all the students. The students are currently working on reading a short chapter book and the teacher gives them activities to complete after each chapter. Yesterday the activity was to write a couple sentences about a time they were sick and what helped them to recover. The teacher had me work one-on-one with a boy with autism, he would tell me his story and I would write it down on a small whiteboard. After I had wrote it out, he would then write out the story on his piece of paper by reading what I wrote. I found this was a very neat way to have him learn to read and write, it kept him engaged in the learning and he was excited to read his story to me again when he was all finished.
Week 4
This week I took the time to look at the inclusiveness of the classroom and I was happy to see how inclusive it is. In the classroom I am in there are no students that have physical disabilities, but there are some intellectual ones. There is a boy with Autism, a boy and a girl with ADHD, some EAL students, and another boy explosive behaviour. These types of behaviours make for a very interesting classroom, but the teacher never has them separated from the rest of the class. She believes that everyone is there for the same reason and for the best success in their futures, they should all be working together. The only times that the students are taken out of the class are for their EAL class or if they are being disruptive to the rest of class. This is not just done for these students, but any student that is acting out.
Week 5
This week I focused on the question on how my school community honours diversity, equity, and human rights and I took the time to really dig deep on how they honour it. I was able to see that since my classroom consists of multiple different cultures and abilities; the teacher always finds ways to include these in the learnings. Around the classroom she has a lot of posters that bring involve the Indigenous ways of learning, as well as posters of kids with a variety of different backgrounds. She often speaks in the different languages that the students know, which allows not only the students who speak these languages to feel welcomed but teaches the other students a new language. She often does this when she is trying to get their attention and they are repeat back what she said. The teacher also uses this technique during their body break songs and dances. It is evident that she is opposed to her students speaking their native language within the classroom and I feel this is a major reason why her newest students feel so welcomed in the classroom.