Reflection 3

I was simply amazed by the list of characteristics of students with dysgraphia, as many fit my son. Poor letter formation and incorrect/inconsistent slant of cursive letters make his writing so difficult to read that he often gets answers marked wrong when they were not. He also has a problem with letter size, spacing and alignment as well as he writes really slowly. I had always thought that he was just lazy and was not trying. (I think I felt this way because he is a G.T. child .) Other signs/symptoms of dysgraphia are incorrect use of upper case and lower case letters. Problems in fluency of handwriting can cause problems in other areas, perhaps even moreso than some of the other dysgraphia symptoms since writing is so laborious that the child may loose their place even while writing.

I found it interesting that by high school most develop a hybrid writing style, I thought it was just me.

I like the idea of teacher modeling since every time the children see the teacher write they can see what their hand needs to do to make the letters look the way they should. This in combination with tracing and writing letters along with naming the letters as they are written is a good place to start. As abilities improve I would move on to independent student practice and writing words. It is likely to take a while to get to this point especially if the student(s) in question are very young or very far behind. If there is time left in the school year I would then move on to having them copy sentences. I would also have the student(s) use self monitoring to check their own improvement and instill confidence in the new abilities they have gained. Also I would use phonemes before I even started teaching spelling words. They do this at Eustace and it seems to work well. For the first two, six weeks no spelling words are taught, just the phonemes. Sounds and letter combinations and expected positions in words are taught and the children make their own flash cards each week to give them extra practice, they bring the cards home and show their parents how to say the sounds. Also at the beginning of the year a large card with all of the sounds and letter combinations are sent home so that parents can practice with their children from a legible list. I like this format and have seen that if a child is given enough time they can excel in spelling by doing this first. I spent hours practicing in the hall with a group of girls that never got help at home. A girl by the name of "Mattie" was an ESL student so her parents didn't even understand the phoneme cards at all. She went from making somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty percent on her weekly phoneme tests to making sixty to seventy percent with the addition of my one hour per week help. It was clear that what she needed was the extra practice that she was not able to get at home. Another girl "Sherry" did not make any improvement with our practice and ended up being identified as having a learning disability, she is now going into fourth grade. While not on par with some of the other students she is doing better than I would have expected back in first grade when I worked with her.

To get children writing i would have them all write in a composition book each day. Each day a student will pull a popsicle stick out of a bucket with a subject or starting line on it. For example one might be pulled that said "If you had 100.00 dollars what would you do with it?" or "I enjoy _______ more than ________, because..." This gives students an opportunity to write about something they like be it cars or animals or the WWF. They are getting guidance without being pigeon holed into writing about a specific thing like "What I did during summer vacation" or "My family is..." I would give them about five minutes to write the story and then another five minutes to draw a picture to go with the story. The drawing gives them a bit of a break and will likely "recharge" them. In these beginning stages I would only ask that the first letter of a sentence be upper case and that there be a period at the end of each sentence so that the child(ren) are not bogged down with mechanics and make it easier for thoughts to make it to paper. As thoughts begin getting to paper more readily I would then start having them follow more of the rules of writing.

While vocabulary or lack there of might be a problem for students I will have a word of the day to help reduce this problem. I will write it, say it, tell them what it means and review it during the day. As the children leave class for specials, lunch and recess I would ask them about the word of the day. I would also offer a small reward for students catching me using the word of the day, maybe all students who caught me during the week would get to sit with me for lunch the next Monday, a fun way to start a week. This would give me an opportunity to just have conversations with the children without so many time pressures. I would be modeling how to put thoughts together further increasing the children's abilities in writing since speaking and writing are so interconnected.

Reflection 2

If I understand correctly ADHD is not a problem with paying attention per si, but with being able to pay attention to everything and not tune out the irrelevant items. For example while I was working at Eustace ISD there was a child who could hear a train coming long before it ever got to town, and would announce that it was coming while no other person in the classroom could hear it. He had the same work to be done as every other child in the room, yet his attention was not focused on the assignment. ADHD can manifest itself in different ways, a child (or adult) can be literally hyper and not able to control their activity level and even this can range from being fidgety to running around like a mad person, it can manifest itself in a quieter way of "daydreaming" and simply not doing the work assigned or even a combination of the two. I found it to be very interesting that this particular disorder was being observed 105 years ago and we still don't completely understand it! Learning disabilities often accompany ADHD one preceding the other or they can "co-occur" as the book puts it. ADHD is more of a problem with focusing on the correct details, staying still and listening while learning disabilities are more of a processing disorder. ADHD needs to be diagnosed using the DSM-V (or the most current available volume) while LD does not need such a tool for diagnosis, but rather testing in the specific area(s) the child seems to have difficulty in processing.

Yes, ADHD should be a separate category from LD in IDEA. While they do often occur together they do not always occur together and need to be differentiated between. A child with a processing issue will not need the same intervention as one that is physically hyper for example. Being separate categories allows for more precise IEP's as well as more targeted interventions.


The next section is very hard to answer as it will depend greatly on the child that I am serving. I can say that I don't think I will be using the self-monitoring of attention technique as I will be teaching children in forth grade or below and it seems like a rather complicated device. I do really like the functional behavioral assessment approach as well as stimulus reduction and structure. These three seem to me that they would work well hand in hand in hand together. I like structure a whole lot anyway so that is likely to be a state in my classroom anyway. With structure in place that leaves little room for stimulus (thus removing it). As far as functional behavior assessment if there is structure and fewer stimuli it will be much easier to pinpoint triggers to the child's misbehavior or inattention. Once identified and predicted then modifications should be easy to begin. I was the TA in a head start class in Eustace and we had a child who without fail made line up times very difficult, we found that letting him hold my hand kept him not only in the line, but kept hem from hitting the other students as we walked to the playground or lunch. (Short background: he had lived with his mother until about 3 weeks before school started at which point he was placed with his father and we thought the female contact was what he craved.) So management will vary widely depending on the age and skill level of the child. What our four year old boy found comforting might be an insult to an eight year old second grader. It is important to remember that each child is an individual and even if Jim and Fred have the same diagnosis they may react differently to interventions and the reward system if implemented needs to fit the child, not just the label.

I felt the article was very true, but too short. I think we as a society over-medicate our children. I like the reason behind his naming his book "The Last Normal Child" and can for sure see why he would feel that way. When you have four year old children put on medication because "he was sick when he was two and he kept playing, so the doctor said I need to put him on something when he starts school" (yes someone did say this to me) I can see why this doctor feels this way. I wish the article had been more in depth, but I did agree with most of what I read.

Reflection 1

Cognitive training is significant in several respects. To put it simply cognitive training re wires the brain of a person with a learning disability to do things that others take for granted. This is not a quick fix, but takes repeated practice that is integrated into lessons and needs to be used in different settings and situations to be fully developed. I really like the different strategies presented in the text. As I read the math strategy steps I realized that this is something they teach in general education students in third grade in Eustace as they get ready for their math TAKS, to the point students are given strategy cards and must must write down their strategy next to all word problems. It is great that so much of the cognitive training focuses on the child learning how to learn on their own and be motivated. I like how children can be taught how to self monitor and have control over their own life. It sure seems like a child with a learning disability would benefit greatly from all of these components from changing thought process and being given strategies to succeed, to self-initiative, as if teaching one without the others would be a failure at the expense of the student.

Let's use my brother Eric as an example here as we discuss how these strategies could benefit children with learning disabilities. Eric could not write letters or numbers that were legible as a child and to this day struggles with it and putting words together to make sense. When I get letters from him they are disasters on paper. Had these cognitive training techniques been used with him as a child, if he had been taught how to revise a thought on paper then perhaps he would have gained the ability to revise before the thought left his head which would make his letters much easier to follow. As it stands his paragraphs are two or three sentences long and he jumps back and forth between several subjects. I might read two sentences on how crummy prison food is then one about the type of books he likes, then back to food, then on to his plans after release, and some more on books and food. This kind of cognitive training would have helped him learn how to better organize his thoughts before putting pen to paper. I am sure that they could change the lives of many people in such a way.

I would definitely use the math strategies as I taught the math lesson for each day. I think that is fairly simple to work into a lesson plan as it is basic in that all students not just the ones labeled learning disabled should be using. I can also see using mnemonic devices in several subject areas like science and social studies. I remember the big one used when I was in school ROY G BIV the colors of the rainbow, now that's effective! I don't really see any difficulty in including these in the lessons either. I really liked the part of the text that talked about using mnemonic devices to learn the states and capitals. Something I will use if I get fourth grade. I also really like the motivators, and they only take a second more than just saying "good job." So many things talked about in the book seem like someone should have come up with them sooner. I also would really like to use the content textbook strategies. I think this is where I would need to sit with my student(s) that need it and go through it with them slowly and repeatedly. I will find a time of day that is relatively quiet and sit with the student(s) on the carpet or around a table and go through each step with them for each section that must be read and gradually reduce the amount of time I spend telling how to get information out of the text and increase the time the student(s) spend telling how to get information out of the text.

I scored a five as a reflective learner, this surprised me in that it was not an eleven. It is very hard for me to work in groups, I never feel like the others are pulling their weight and I end up doing all of the work even if I only submit my section as I want to make sure my grade is not affected by someone else's lazy streak. I also scored a five on intuitive another surprise after reading the descriptions I would have expected to score a one on either in this section as I feel I am fairly balanced between the two. I scored a three as a verbal learner, no surprises here I already knew that, I can remember things said when I was only a toddler but have a harder time picturing where we lived. I also scored a three on sequential, and again no surprises here. I expected that. I mean skipping around in the book is really upturning my world. I love things in the order they came. I used to expect things to be so linear that I even ordered my money by serial number within each denomination. I have a hard time seeing what a finished product will be if I don't have every detail in my head already.