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 Happy New Year! Hope the holidays were good for all of you. We had a great Holiday party! It was well attended even though we held it the Sunday before Christmas! We thank Arc of Anne Arundel County for allowing us to use their facility. Also, we thank SANTA for visiting us! This year we also had a volunteer that helped us with the children. Her name is Kim. She is a young adult woman with Down syndrome who is interested in volunteering for our group! She is wonderful and will touch your heart as soon as you meet her! So, now it is time to get things back to normal with kids going back to school and activities. Also, there are many workshops in the schedule to help us with our continuing issues and need for knowledge. I hope all of you will check out the links on our site to see what is happening around town. Please take advantage of those workshops! Also, there is a Parent-to-Parent network in the works for Anne Arundel County with Arc of Anne Arundel County. Our group has been asked to participate! I am personally very excited about this opportunity. If you are interested in donating your time, please call Jamie Jean at 410-349-0195 or email at jeanfive@netzero.net We are hoping to schedule some meetings for our group this year. We will keep you posted on what we come up with for speakers. If you have suggestions, please contact Jamie Jean. One very important free workshop that you may be interested in attending is: Destination Inclusion Please contact Kim Willard at 410-343-1438 and kwillard@bcpl.net or April Deiger at 410-371-0662 and andeigert@yahoo.com for more information. Please remember to check out the links for more information on upcoming workshops with Arc of Anne Arundel County and Parents Place of Maryland. Also, there is a link for Special Olympics for Anne Arundel County. Ten-pin bowling is starting this Thursday, January 9th! Again, Happy New Year to all of you! Please feel free to contact Jamie Jean with any ideas or to volunteer for our group! Jamie Jean had the opportunity to go to the TASH conference in Boston in December. It was overwhelming and very informative! Over the next few months we will share some of the different workshops presented with information on how to get more information. TASH is an international organization that fights for inclusion for all people with disabilities. There is a local chapter in Maryland called MASH. Check out the website www.tash.org There is one synopsis of a seminar from the conference for you below. I will include the information on the speaker so you may contact them for more information. One fantastic seminar was Moving Beyond Emergent Literacy presented by Susan Gately. She discussed: A model for planning literacy instruction for students with more intensive special needs. A variety of tasks, methodologies and materials will be examined. There was discussion of how to modify existing emergent literacy materials to move students beyond emergent literacy. She said that Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome by Patricia Logan Oelwein had many ideas for parents to teachers to use. She discussed the difference of Function and Form. Function relates to the understanding and Form relates to Reading. Repetition, review and reinforcement should be used to solidify the lessons the children as learning in her opinion. “Typical kids spend 60-90 minutes on literacy at school.” A suggested daily time management model was given as Read Aloud (teacher reading) 10-15 minutes The speaker also discussed the stages of participants in literacy:
Grazing: picking up one book after another The speaker also stated that teachers should provide “sturdy books” for children to handle in the classroom. Possibly taking them apart and laminating them and putting them back together. Obviously, I cannot give you word for word the seminar but it was very informative for me. I was able to see some of where the teachers are coming from in the activities that they do with my son in the classroom. If you are interested in more information from Susan Gately, you may contact her at sgately@rivier.edu and her phone number is 603-897-8578. |
