How teaching children to accept someone who’d different, who is special needs is a collaborative effort from the teachers, as well as the parents, and the students’ willingness to be open to accept someone who’s different than they are, translated…
“Mom, Star progressed a whole lot through the summer!”, at the start of my daughter’s second grade year, she’d come home and told me, with excitement, “He can now feed himself with a spoon, not like how he’d made a huge mess at mealtime from before!”, she looked like she’d found something amazing, excitedly chimed on, I’d smiled and told her, “That’s great, I’m sure, that Star’s mom would be happy too!”
As my daughter just began elementary school, in the invitation of the homeroom instructor, a few of us parents came to class, to hear the storytime sessions in the mornings, my husband and I, because we were curious of what our daughter was doing in school, we’d gone too. As we walked in, we saw that on that last row, a teacher was sitting beside a student, back then I’d not thought too much. And yet, as the story mom told the tales, that child started making the noises, and got excited and smacked the desks, and the teacher beside him told him calmly, to stop what he was doing, I looked at my husband, so, there’s a special needs child in the class.
As we exited my daughter’s school, I’d discussed what happened in class a short while before with my husband, what was surprising to us was that as the child was making the noises, the rest of the kids weren’t distracted, and stayed focused on the teacher telling the story, we were both curious, as to how the homeroom instructor had helped and led the children to accept their special needs classmate.
illustration from UDN.com
A few days later, my daughter told me that she’d loved taking walks with Star during break. And as I’d listened more, so, Star is mildly autistic, and, for the first and second periods, with the teaching assistant, he’d stayed in the regular classrooms, for third and fourth periods, he would go to the potential classroom to learn. The homeroom instructor encouraged the rest of the class to play with Star, so the kids would take turns taking walks with him or playing with him. And, afterwards, my daughter had, often told me of Star’s moods, what he liked, and I’d, observed, that my daughter’s original hurried, forceful temperament started, shifting.
My story mom and I knew one another from a book club meet. She’d told me that at the end of the semester that year, she’d used the illustrated book as a guide, started a discussion of having the kids in class tell who in class had made the most progress, to give each other the praises, the majority of the class fought to answer how Star had made the progresses. My friend told me, that this class had such care and concern for the special needs child, that it was moving, we all felt the heart of the homeroom instructor’s using her heart to guide the kids to understand, to accept Star, and how hard it must’ve been for the teacher, and this lesson became, the biggest blessing for this group of young children.
So, this success is all in part of how the teacher, the parents, and the students all worked together, with the teacher taking the lead in introducing to the class that they have a special needs child, and how this group of young children are receptive to things, and how they’re, willing to play with the young boy with autism, and this is an important lesson that’s not academic, that the group of young children learned, in the interactions they’d shared with this, special needs child.