SPECIAL NEEDS SCHOOL VISIT

Vision & Mission
The main objective of IAC ( IDEAS Autism Center) is to provide holistic early intervention, care, therapy and education to autistic children from low-income households so that they will be able to attend mainstream government schools by ages seven to nine.

IAC Staff & Students 
Targeted students are from the age of 3 - 9 years old.There are 28 students and 9 staff and 4 volunteers currently. 

IAC Curriculum 
National Special Education curriculum which accommodates specific needs of the individual child. Every child is assessed prior to entry and a tailored individual educational plan (IEP) is then developed. This is then updated based on their progress and assessment at the end of every six months.

The main learning areas in the curriculum are attending skills, imitation skills, receptive language skills, expressive language skills, pre-academic skills, self-help skills, art education, music and movement, physical exercise, social skills and school readiness.

Facilities that the school provides

The students will have horse riding class, swimming class, gardening,domestic activity, art & craft and sensory skill class. 

IAC also provides therapy such as occupational therapy and speech therapy. occupational therapy is to improve the quality of a child's through successful and meaningful experiences where the children will be able to participate as independently as possible in meaningful life activities. These skills includes, fine motor skills, play skills, self-help skill and socialization skills. There are different approaches and theories lies in this therapy such as developmental theories, learning theories, model of occupational performance, sensory integration, play theories and so on. IAC conduct occupational therapy in the form of play activities which used to enhance or maintain play, self -help and school readiness skills. There will be one to one session for each students with occupational therapist  in IAC. 

speech therapy is to improve the children's communication and language skills. Each child will have a one to one session with the speech therapist once a week. The sessions includes recognition of alphabets, objects and sounds, trace or copy alphabets and write in both Malay and English.  

Materials used to facilitate learning 

They have a picture chart board for individual child. The chart consist of routine that a child need to do everyday. 

For beginners, they used wooden puzzle to train fine motor skills.

For intermediate, they used lego blocks as a imaginative figures for story telling session.

They also listen to various songs during the morning session such as ABC songs, children rhyme and so on. whereas for advanced level students, they are more towards writing, interacting with teachers. The trace dotted lines for alphabets.  

students responses

when we went into the classroom, the students were so excited to see us and they came and approach us by shaking hands, say good morning. The children are quite focused on their work that they teacher gave them. only two of the children were unable to concentrate, they were standing on the chair and walking around.

Teaching approaches that the school adopt

Early Intensive Behaviour Intervention

Early Intensive Behavioral intervention was originally developed in the 1960s by psychologist Dr Ivor Lovaas,also known as Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), this is a highly structured and intense form of therapy which aims to teach linguistic, cognitive, social and self-help skills by breaking them down into small tasks. Discrete Trial Training (DTT)is the main strategy used within this programme whereby the trainer instructs the child using a series of learning opportunities or ‘trials’. Praise and rewards are used to reinforce good behavior.

DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES

"Development" refers to the process of acquiring skills in stages, from simpler to more complex. (For example, a child must babble sounds before he can say words; conquer words before he can utter phrases.)  In Greenspan's view, the area of development where children with (Autism Spectrum Disorder) ASDs are most impacted is that involving higher order thinking and relating, from shared attention, to back and forth interactions, to problem solving, all the way to abstract thought. An adult follows the child's lead to engage in play that will hopefully provide opportunities for connection, and therefore, to ever more complex emotional and social relating. If a child were lining up trains, for instance, an adult might get on the floor right beside them and line up trains, too, trying to catch the child's interest and his glance, and to share his pleasure or his frustration.

My thoughts after visiting the school is it looks more homely environment where the children will have a peaceful environment to study. They wont have fears in them. It is my first chance to get to see how does the IAC operates and what types of teaching learning they are adopting. To be a teacher in a special needs school, one must be really patient and experiences to handle all kinds of behavior. 

Primary School materials portfolio 2

For the second week at the Tamil school, The flow of the activities is as follow.

1. Recap last week's lesson ( stated in Primary school portfolio 1)
2. Have a discussion on what they are going to do with the scrapbook once they have completed it. Remind students that they are going to visit UNMC and do their presentation about the scrapbook .
3.  Pre -teach vocabulary that is related to the theme ( my secondary school) and the scrapbook.
4. Activity on height and foot order
5. construction on scrapbook
6. practice presentation skills
7. wrap up the lesson by reminding students on when they are going to UNMC and what they are suppose to do there and what UNMC student's have prepared for them and so on.  

When we design the materials, we were incorporating cooperative and collaborative learning that we have learned during our first year into it because we want students to work together rather than competing with each other individually and also helps students to develop social interaction skills. However, when we teachers give out the pre-teach worksheets to students, the first impression that comes to the students mind was "omg, they are going to gives us writing to do".  But when we explained to the students that it is a pair work and discuss the answers together. The students were much more engaged that we expected. 

According to Eggen & Kauchak (2012)  , There are certain principles for cooperative learning that we have implemented such as we keep our materials ready on hand so it is easy to distribute to students, the objectives were explained to the students on why and what they are doing this for, we set a time for them to complete given tasks, all teacher will monitor students in their group and guide them throughout the session and the outcome of the activity will be the completed scrapbook.

 Even though, there are numbers of theories and approach have been implemented but still there are some confusion within our group members. For example. the height and foot order activity where the students have to arrange themselves according to the shorter to the tallest without speaking. I felt that there are no connection between the activity and the theme of this project. The other two main activity such as vocabulary teaching and scrapbook were very relevant to this theme and the purpose of this project. The vocabulary that were taught are ambition, future, excited, memories and so on. 

It would have been better if we teachers have looked more in detailed about the purpose and objective of this project.So that we would not have gone out of the topic when conducting some of the activity. Last year, we had this same Tamil school project. The activities that we designed were much more appropriate and relevant to the objective of the project. We were very sure that our students have learnt lot from the activity that we conducted. We had games but it is in-cooperated with the teaching and learning. But this time, the games stand alone itself which never really facilitate the teaching and learning. However, there are also some other external factor such as time constrain where we only had two days to work with the kids and we teachers are not suppose to squeeze all lesson at once. so we tried to make it simple but it turn out to be quite messy and irrelevant for some of the activities. 

If I were given another opportunity to recreate the lesson, I would teach students about time management which will useful for their life after this. I would ask students to say verbally on what are the things that we can do to mange our time as a high school students. or write this on a sticky note and stick it on card board.   We also can have discussion if there are students that are unaware of what are the ways to manage. This type of activity encourages students to talk and write as well. 

Writing is a life skill that improves with practice. Our students will begin learning to write more in high school and continue throughout their education. Learning basic writing skills in elementary school is key to building upon those skills in high school, college and so on. I would love to come out with a writing activities that enable students to effectively learn to write and communicate ideas throughout their education.

 For example: Ask for a list of nouns (engine, ruler, pencil, tree). Then make a list of verbs (sipped, stole, rushed, 
wished). The game is to invent sentences that include a noun and a verb from the lists. This can be fun if the nouns and verbs do not match in any sensible way - you will get some quite creative solutions!
The engine sipped...
The ruler stole...
The pencil rushed...
The tree wished...
Now complete the sentences preferably choosing unusual ideas, e.g.
The engine sipped from a cup of silences.
The ruler stole a tongue of ideas. The pencil rushed down the stairs and into the garden. The tree wished it could turn over a new leaf.

Some students tend to have problem in starting their writing because they do not have a starter topic. Therefore, I would give a topic that is related to the theme of secondary school such as :
Example 2:  I wish to be a ______________when i grow up. Then I will.....

references:

• Eggen, P. and Kauchak, D. (2012). Educational psychology. 1st ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Education.