Every Saturday, participants post photos based on a theme. The theme for this Saturday, March 8 is DIFFERENT.
Different for me mean a lot of things, as it does for the families with special needs children that I work with. Yes, because their children have these special needs, they are considered different because they don’t necessarily fall into the “normal” categories that usually go with “normal” children. Yes, they are considered special because they need different teaching skills and/or different equipments and/or different learning strategies to help them learn new things and be able to adapt well to different situations that they may encounter.
Below are a few examples of how and what we special education teachers do to help these children learn:
They are being taught appropriate social skills.
They learn best when they are encouraged and given the proper guidance.
The nitty-gritty of language skills we don’t really teach typically developing children are being taught to them in details.
Most of all, they learn best when people appreciate them for who they are and what they can do and what they can not do. That is my son Julian with one of his buddies, PJD, a boy with Down’s Syndrome.
Yes, my son and my youngest daughter often ask me why the children seem “different“. I try my best to explain to my children that everyone else is different and we have to learn to live with them such as they too, need to adjust to us too, who are different from them. Here is a link to the IDEA (The Individuals with Disabilities Act) 2004 to give you some ideas about children with special needs under the US Department of Education.
Please view our other Photo Hunt entry here. Thank you 
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:11 am and is filed under Being a (Special Ed) Teacher, Lessons in Life, My Thoughts, Photo Hunters, Snapshots, special education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
