This week has been very fun so far sitting in the café and working with Sarah and Veronica on teaching them more about disability, behavior management, and intervention strategies for teaching children with disabilities in the classroom. When school starts again in July, Veronica is going to start working with various children from who we believe need extra help in a resource room model using various techniques and materials/manipulatives we have discussed. Today, we talked about functional behavior assessment and various intervention techniques such as chaining, task analysis, prompting, use of authentic activities, shaping and using models. We are focusing on strategies to support reading, writing, and math instruction first. We did also discuss the importance of adaptive skills and vocational skills, but most of the children we are working with have learning disabilities, so their adaptive skills are good, but need support with academics.  After some instruction yesterday, Veronica used a picture book as the basis to create a lesson and I was very impressed. She did a great job. We brainstormed some other days to add to her ideas and general ideas for improving the classroom for all children. We will talk to the classroom teacher about this sometime soon, maybe Friday.

As several of you know, I don’t drive in the Boston area because it scares me. I won’t drive in Tanzania also because it scares me more and they drive on the other side of the road, I can’t get used to that. It takes me weeks each time I come to remember to get in the passenger side on the left. But, I still need to do something to be useful since Sarah is doing all the driving. So my job is to lock and unlock the house. We have a very secure door with a key lock and two padlocks, one at the top and one at the bottom. But, because I am so short, I had to buy a stool so I could reach the top padlock. So today’s picture for your enjoyment is me unlocking the door. Yes, we can all laugh at me, I think it is cute. Sarah pointed out that I am on my tippy toes as well.

This is me stretching to unlock the door.