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Different Ways of Learning of All Children (General Suggestions for Adapting Curricula for Children with Differences) Sally Patton Winchester, MA By welcoming children with special challenges into our congregations, we welcome the divine into our hearts. A compelling reason for a church to be welcoming to children with special challenges flows from our first UU principle honoring the inherent worth and dignity of every person. An equally compelling and perhaps the most important reason for welcoming children with special needs is that ministry to all our children improves and flourishes as a result of our creative inclusivity. Ministering to children with special challenges is a reminder that all of us and all children have different ways of learning and different ways of responding to the world. As we stimulate our creative ideas to serve special needs, we often find that the old ways of teaching may not be the best ways to teach and inspire our children. Children with special needs can help prevent us from becoming too complacent and can challenge us to grow, learn and expand our own spirituality. The many different UU curricula available help us as religious educators convey to our children our ministry, our spirituality, and what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. It is important for religious educators whether we are ministers, religious education directors, parents, grandparents, or other interested adults to be all-inclusive and to take into account the different ways of learning and different ways of knowing of all our children. Having to minister to special needs children often is the catalyst that jump-starts the creative process leading to more inclusive curriculum planning. As you consider using this curriculum, look at how it can be adapted to be all-inclusive and honor everyone's gifts as well as differences. In order to do this, it is helpful to encourage people to abandon the school-based mode of teaching and to create multiple ways of teaching our UU spirituality and philosophy. Traditionally, UU-published curricula have relied heavily on the verbal, language-based way of learning. While there are wonderful ideas and thoughts being conveyed in these curricula, too heavy a reliance on the verbal/logical way of teaching can create a situation in which church looks too much like school and children do not want to come. It can limit parents and leaders abilities to teach to highly active children, and it does not honor the different ways of learning, which makes it more difficult to include special needs children. Much of the published curricula can be adapted to include more hands-on approaches to teaching. Therefore, in curriculum planning, it is important to involve everyone in creating ways to respond to the different needs of all the children. HOW TO ADAPT THIS CURRICULUM Know Your Children. When using and adapting a curriculum for any group of children, it is essential to learn who are your children. I know that this sounds basic, but overly busy parents who have agreed to teach, especially new teachers, often are not briefed about the children before they start to teach. The children with more hidden disabilities may or may not be recognizable, depending on whether or not the parents are interested in disclosing this information. However, if the child has been in the RE program for a while, special needs conditions such as attention deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity (AD/HD), oppositionally defiant behavior, epilepsy, diabetes, etc will be detected or the parents will inform the religious educator when they feel comfortable that their child is being accepted. Learning disabilities often go undetected, which is an excellent reason for teaching to multiple intelligences. Be prepared for children who are overly active or hyperactive. This is normal in any group of children. If you are having difficulty successfully including a child, do not hesitate to ask the Director of Religious Education to approach the parents for help and ideas. Be aware that all children, not only special needs children, have different learning styles. Knowing who your children are should affect how the lesson for each Sunday is taught. Have a Proactive Behavior Management Plan. Developing a proactive behavior management plan before figuring out what you are going to teach for the session is absolutely critical for maintaining a welcoming and beneficial experience for all children, particularly for our children who struggle with hyperactivity or who are just having a bad day. Have the children help you create a group list of standards of behavior. Make sure all the standards are stated positively. For example, listen while someone else is talking, only one person talks at a time, comments should always be positive, everyone's opinion is respected. Then, make sure that these standards are enforced equally for all children. Repeat the standards of behavior before each Sunday session and provide constant reminders. The children can volunteer to say each standard. Try to create a behavior management plan based on preventive discipline. This involves establishing and maintaining routines so that you are setting up a predictable structure and a predictable environment. Greeting the children is an easy and affirming way of starting the Sunday meeting positively. Look each child in the eye in a friendly way and let them know you are glad they are there. (Note: Avoid eye contact with either autistic or Asperger's Syndrome children as this often will scare them.) Allow for easy movement around the room. Be aware of whether the spacing of the furniture, pillows, etc in the room says "Come in make yourself comfortable" or says "Come in and run around in circles". Use lots of praise, incentives for good behavior, and reminders about good behavior. This is particularly important for the AD/HD child. You can never praise a child too much. It is also helpful to have activities available for the children to do at the beginning of the session while waiting for everyone to arrive. Teach to Different Learning Styles. It is difficult to teach to the different learning styles of all children if you do not understand your own preferred way of learning. Without this understanding, parents and leaders often end up teaching the way they were taught in school, which is usually heavily lecture, answer, and discussion. Howard Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences (MI) is a wonderful tool for expanding people's ideas about ways people learn and how to teach. I recommend using the simple questionnaires in either Thomas Armstrong's book Seven Kinds of Smart or David Laser's book Eight Ways of Knowing: Teaching for Multiple Intelligences to help people understand the MI theory and how it applies to themselves and to children. This can free people to be involved in a creative curriculum planning process. The eight multiple intelligences are: verbal/linguistic, visual/spatial, musical/rhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, logical/mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, and naturalist. Once you have a general understanding of the MI theory, you can then adapt lessons in any curriculum using the eight intelligences. I hope that this will encourage you to use your own teaching strengths and create an enjoyable teaching experience. Hopefully, you can intuit the different types of learning styles of the children in your session so that you can plan to the children's strengths. Many teaching activities cross intelligences. For example, planting a garden is naturalist and bodily-kinesthetic and could also be used as an interpersonal (cooperation) and intrapersonal (personal connection with nature) activity. Therefore, with one activity you can teach to the strengths of many children and accommodate many different special needs. A FEW BASIC AND PROVEN TECHNIQUES THAT WORK Engage children in storytelling. Never ask children to help read a story because you can assume that there is always at least one child in the group who struggles. Also, we are not in the business of teaching children to read and children generally get bored when other children read. Asking for volunteers causes anxiety for children who have difficulty reading. They feel mortified that everyone in the room knows their difficulty and think they are dumb because they never volunteer, whether this is true or not. Instead, you should read the story. Better yet, familiarize yourself with the story and tell it in your own words. Ask for volunteers to help act out while you are telling the story, which encourages spontaneity and gets all the children actively engaged in the activity whether they are or not acting. There are many ways to involve all children in this activity including the shy, quiet ones who can, for example, sit quietly and pretend to be one of the characters, and absorb the story. Involve the kids in a hands-on activity before starting your discussion. Most children do not want to attend a Sunday RE program that seems to be just a repeat of school. Sitting still and listening to the teacher lecture and solicit answers is usually the last thing children want to do on Sunday morning. Much more interesting and spontaneous conversations usually occur when the children are actively involved in a hands-on activity that is related to the theme. It keeps them engaged, lessens boredom, and helps those children who have difficulty sitting still. For example, if the theme for the day is our connection to all things living on earth, a discussion about how we are all connected could occur while the children are planting an herb garden for the church or individual pots for themselves. Guided meditations are a wonderful way of calming down an overactive group and/or ending the RE session. I have found that guided meditations work well with almost every type of child. Believe it or not, this works especially well with hyperactive children. Be sure to darken the room and ask the children to get as comfortable as they can, whether that's lying on the floor, leaning against the wall, or sitting in a chair. Guided meditations engage the children's imaginations while helping them to quiet themselves and connect with their inner knowing. Guided meditations can also be created for almost every theme or teaching subject. Be sure to speak slowly with pauses to allow the children to do their own visioning. For many children with special challenges who have had negative experiences in school, it is essential that their church experiences be more positive and different. We need to design a time to share and reflect, creating a place where it is safe to talk about differences and difficulties and not feel ashamed. The essence of the worshipping experience is creating an opportunity for children to learn to honor each other's differences and gifts as well as connecting with the specialness inside themselves. This is so important for children with special challenges because they have been taught all their lives that they are different, and unfortunately many have been taught that there is something wrong with them. They have much to teach us and much to learn about themselves. The church can be a place that nurtures their souls. |
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