Tuesday, March 2, 2010

When Something Doesn't Work

Last week I posted some pictures of a failed activity I did with Charlie. I printed out a ocean scene on my computer and then had Charlie stick sea horse and turtle stickers on it. I thought it would be a slam dunk.

WRONG.




As a teacher I was taught to "self-monitor" that's fancy-speak for "figure out where it went wrong." Ideally, you're doing this constantly so if your lesson flops in first period, you can start tweaking it so your whole day doesn't suck.


So I thought about the sticker activity.



Seemed age appropriate. Charlie enjoys sticky stuff. He's got good enough use of his hands. Hmmmm. . . . vision. Looking carefully at our first attempt it was easy to see that there's virtually no visual contrast between the ocean scene and the stickers.

Think I've found my problem.




So, we tried it again. Since I'm lazy, I just flipped the sheet of paper over--would have been better if I'd printed out a black and white sea scene, but we do what we can, right.

He liked it a lot better this way--even got a little smile.




I think we both learned something.
**If you're wondering, the red on Charlie's face is eczema--if we run the heater for like five seconds, he gets it and it takes me a week to get rid of it***