Standard 4

Standard 4: General Curriculum teacher candidates have the knowledge and skills to use systematic, explicit, multi-sensory methods to teach communication skills, reading, written expression, and mathematics.

Evidences

 Reflection

 During my student teaching experience, I was in a classroom with five hearing impaired students in three different grade levels.  I had two students in kindergarten, two students in first grade, and one student in second grade.  All of them had limited hearing abilities.  All of them had hearing aids, and two of them had cochlea implants.  In this classroom, the students were all auditory, so we did not use sign language at all.  The kindergartener's had limited vocabulary so planning lessons were very different.

In the lessons that I planned, vocabulary and picture clues were very important to the students comprehension of what I was trying to teach.  So every lesson began with a picture book and vocabulary activities.  All math activities involved lots of pictures and manipulatives.  In order to reach each student where they were, I had to start from the basics (vocabulary) and build upon their current knowledge.  If that meant taking them on a nature walk to see what grass and trees were, that's what I did.

When planning lessons for any student population, there must be various approaches to teaching the lesson.  Some students respond better to auditory lessons, others are hands-on.  Regardless, as a teacher you must be able to adapt and adjust lessons to reach every student in the classroom.