On Special Needs, Movement, and Sanity

My special needs students are a lively bunch with a wide range of abilities, gifts, and difficulties.  Obviously, along with elementary music, I've never taught students in a self-contained special education classroom.  It's a steep learning curve.  With such varied age groups and levels, it's difficult to find activities that will engage a majority of students without leaving any in the dust.  There are some difficulties that I was unprepared for, like taking turns, or following directions when learning how to play the xylophones.  I'm learning several lessons very quickly, some on my own, and some with the kind redirection of the classroom leaders.

I played freeze dance with all of my students the first week, and I tried to modify that activity for the class.  I thought instead of freeze dancing, my non-ambulatory students could participate by playing percussion instruments.  I quickly learned that everyone wanted an instrument.  I also quickly learned that some were not able to follow the direction to stop playing when the music stopped.  It was noisy.  The next week, I tried to test their hearing.  I handed out claves and triangles hoping that they would play the woods when I was playing a wood instrument and the triangles when I played a metal.  Nope.  Not even close.  As soon as the instruments were handed out, I completely lost them.  The only thing I was able to do for the rest of the period was help a few students try to figure out how to play the traingle.  It was a very noisy disaster.

I was lucky enough to run into one of the classroom leaders.  She helped me greatly, and gave me the advice to use our technology to my advantage.  Each classroom in the district is equipped with a promethean board.  For those who don't know, a promethean board is basically a giant touch screen that hooks up to a computer, and the students and teachers can directly mainpulate objects and such.  It's am amazing tool for classroom teaching if it's harnessed to its full power.  For this class, however, it was basically a giant screen TV for youtube videos of preschool songs.  We sang The Wheels on the Bus, Hickory Dickory Dock, The Animal Sounds Song and other such wonderful titles.  I finally had them engaged.  We even did a little bit of choreography.  I kept them occupied until the last five minutes of class when we got to play freeze dance.  I ignored the instruments and instead with and danced with the non-ambulatory students.  I got giggles, I got some great dancing partners, and I even got blown a kiss at the end of class.

After some of the frazzled moments in my life this week, both personally and professionally, it felt great to have a success story.  I normally see those classes out the door and promptly lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a moment to collect myself.  I'm not exaggerating or kidding.  Today though, I tidied up my room, gathered my goods, and almost skipped out to my car.