Reflection Of The Learning Environment In My First Grade Classroom

The following learning environment being described is Gilmor Elementary with the majority of the observations being done in my own first grade classroom.

1) universal design

For math lessons and assignments, my host teacher and myself implement universal design for learning in our general education classroom by allowing students access to a variety of manipulatives that are easily assessable for students who need or want to use them (DL Series No. 1, 2012). When teaching lessons, we try to incorporate the use of manipulatives in at least one of our models or examples to show our students how to use manipulatives for that lesson’s specific objective. Additionally, students are either given manipulative (though it is not required, or necessary to use them) or allowed to access manipulatives if they believe it will help them solve problems. This is done because a few of our students rely heavily on manipulatives to understand and solve math problems, but this universal design allows all students to benefit from these manipulatives if they so

Since modifications change the expectations set on students, they can severely limit a student’s chances to meet the qualifications to graduate with a degree (Special Education and Inclusion, Session 3). Because of this, I believe my school has not implemented any modifications to make sure other avenues of support are implemented first. One modification that I think would help one of my students with the hearing loss (who struggles with phonemic awareness) would be to give her easier to sound out words on worksheets and assignments in our general education classroom. My teacher and I could give her words like dog and cat (which have been featured in our “words of the week”) when working on assignments related to language acquisition, instead of words with harder to discriminate sounds such as ship and