I enjoyed the articles we read this week especially because my placement is in a kindergarten classroom. The Marcus article was intriguing to me because I can completely see how as a teacher it would be easy to assume because one student is gifted in one area they are gifted in all and not learning to write was purely behavioral. However, as I was reading, I was thinking about in my classroom. At the kindergarten level the students all seem quite eager to learn. There is some frustration when a student cuts away from the line or can't make their picture look how they imagined in their head, but for the most part the students like to learn new things. This made me think that if I had a student that was unwilling to do something I would probably wonder if it was because the child was not able to.
The Breitfleder article talked about how to accomidate early childhood. Entering school for the first time can be scary and having routines and daily things students can expect makes the adaptation easier. I see this everyday in my classroom. Although the centers the students do are different, they do them at the same time everyday and between each center the students "freeze" look at the chart, and know exactly where to go. I also see these visual supports in the morning time. Every morning the students go over the calendar and the weather. Also, before lunch they always line up in "abc" order. This helps the students adapt to school and feel comfortable because they know what to expect.
It is easy for me to comment on this post because your situation is very similar to mine in kindergarten. I feel very similar to how you do about the Marcus article. It is very interesting to see in our classrooms the great amount of diversity that we experience everyday. This article was very eye-opening to me because due to the young age of the students in both of our classrooms, they have not yet been tested for Learning Disorder (LD), so even if some students will some day be pulled out of the mainstream classroom, they are in with the other students right now and we are facing many challenges with these students' involvement. For example, a few of the students' in both our rooms are unable to follow simple directions OR associate any initial sounds with letters. At this point in the year, these students are just falling further and further behind because they are not making any progress and have already been placed on the retention list. As a teacher, I think that it is very important to continue making attempts at getting these students to learn, even if they have not made significant progress in the past.
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