A typical ice cream social is mostly a time to meet and mingle.  The students are excited to see their friends again after the summer.  This time, we set up a play area in one corner with blocks, books, and other entertainment.  While some played there, others got ice cream or popsicles and then joined their parents as they chatted with teachers and other parents alike.

Head of School Ann Rooney then introduced the faculty and specialists, giving each a few minutes to talk about who they were and why they were at TWLS - the difference their programs made.  After a few further announcements, it was time for ice cream again, as other students demanded teacher Sarah Trout’s attention to tell about their summer exploits.  We hope everyone went home happy, full of ice cream and school information, and ready for the first day of school!

You’ve been teaching at TWLS for over two years. How did you first hear about us and how did you join our team?

I went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) with an Elementary Education degree. I moved to Minnesota from Florida and was looking online at schools for special needs children. I chose to work at TWLS because they had the same philosophy and teachings I believe in when working with a child with special needs, like focusing on teaching the “whole” child and giving them individualized attention.

What is your background in working with children with special needs?
I worked as a special ed teacher for one year in Missouri then for two years in Florida. So I had three years as a special ed teacher before TWLS. [When I moved to Minnesota] I saw the program on the website and gave the school a call. I started volunteering in February 2008 and they hired me part-time in April. I’m now working at TWLS full-time.

What types of classes do you teach to the children at TWLS?
I teach language arts to the middle school students including as well as the younger students. I teach them using the Sonday System (a system using multisensory structured phonics, reading, writing, and spelling program for beginning readers). A highlight from the previous school year was working on the Sonday System with the middle school students. They moved up twenty levels this year, which is a big accomplishment.

What are some other things that make working at TWLS rewarding?
Seeing the kids grow in their academics, social skills, and confidence. Also, working with Maddie Louis this past year and watching her grow and make friends. I worked with her quite a lot.

Outside of teaching at TWLS, what are some of your favorite things to do?
I like hiking and biking, spending time with my husband and dog, Gizmo. My favorite place to visit is back home to visit my family in Nebraska. None of my family lives around here. And my favorite book is Flat Stanley – a children’s book.

In past years, the camp’s focus has been on the Flower of Life Card Company, where the students make and decorate cards to sell at the annual August Garage Sale. This year, the kids have taken it a step further. In addition to the card sales, they focused on selling products to those attending the basketball classes next door. Calling themselves “The Hydration Team,” they set up shop both before and after each basketball sessions, encouraging those walking by to purchase their products.

Each morning before they begin their sales, the students have a business meeting to discuss the previous day’s profits and their predictions for the morning. They also compare the differences between their operating expenses (how much the drinks initially cost the Hydration Team) versus their profits (what the team made after their sales).

“The camp gives the students an opportunity for business learning. They understand the idea of inventory and their products to be sold,” explains camp teacher, Sue McCrary. “To allow the students a visual on the amount of money they are earning, they fill out a bar graph each day with the amount of money they have made from each product.”

The students can then compare their daily earnings and learn about business highs and lows. For example, only one drink was sold on Thursday, compared to much higher sales earlier in the week. Still, the kids don’t get discouraged as they try to push their product to passersby, yelling, “Water and Gatorade here! Come buy some water and Gatorade!”

After a week of beverage sales, the students have raised close to $40. For their final day of entrepreneur camp, the students are spending their earned money in the community. They already have their day planned out, including breakfast at Perkins, playtime at Chutes and Ladders Park, and a short trip to Target’s dollar section. They’ve learned that hard work leads to great rewards in all businesses, and are excited to spend their hard-earned cash.

For children with special needs, actually being able to punch numbers into a cash machine, add up sales, and compare profits makes a world of difference in their understanding of business development. In addition, knowing that the cards they create are eventually going to be sold provides a sense of accomplishment.

Details on the Annual August Garage Sale are to come, so make sure to stop by and look at the students’ cards!

Unlike with most other languages, social skills like polite communication and paying attention to others are embedded in ASL. Since it’s a visual language, there’s no way to see what someone is saying without making eye contact with them other person and concentrating on their face and hands. Respect for others and greater focus then come naturally, simply through talking to others with signs. Your eyes can’t wander around the room, and you can’t turn your back on someone while talking to them. You have to be face-to-face, treating them with respect. ASL teaches them how to engage with each other, watch each other – you can’t communicate in ASL without making eye contact and concentrating on the other person.

Because everyone began learning ASL at the same level, and because it uses a different type of vocabulary that the typical verbal one (firing up different sections of the brain), many of our students have felt it to be an incredibly freeing experience. ASL has allowed them to be more assertive without running the risk of starting a conflict through a raised voice or abrupt tone. They have to think about what they say, and take ownership of their words and actions in a mature way. “Even the quietest student has learned to be more assertive with the things he wanted to do, and has felt much more free to express himself through signs,” says teacher Debbie Lawrence.

ASL has also been a powerful force in building our students’ confidence, as they sign and translate at a very high level, what Lawrence describes as “learning at nearly the college level at converting English to ASL.” Not only that, but the language gave them the opportunities to rebuild their identities with new ‘sign names’. “When a person signs with the first deaf person they meet, they are given a sign name, consisting of the first initial of their first name and a gesture illustrating their character,” Lawrence explains. “One student went up to our deaf visitor and signed ‘can you give me a sign name.’ She smiled, made the sign for ‘A’, and followed it with ‘beautiful’, and [our student’s face] just lit up with joy. [Giving out names to the class] really made a difference to them. It told them who they were in the class.”

Once the school year has started again in the fall, Debbie Lawrence, our wonderful ASL instructor, would like to welcome you to our Signing Circle of Friends class on Wednesdays at 1:00PM – feel free to come and observe or learn. We love having community members in class!

Go on to Part 3, or back to Part 1.

You’ve been teaching at TWLS for two years now. What made you decide to get involved with children with special needs?
It started in 3rd grade. I had a friend with physical challenges and I helped her out. I remember thinking that I’d like to work with people with physical and cognitive limitations. Working with her and learning about her exercises really showed me that I’d like to work with people with special needs. I graduated with my undergrad from the University of Western Michigan and got my masters at the University of St. Mary’s. I also taught special needs classes at Kennedy High school for nine years.

How did you get involved with TWLS?
Well it’s kind of a long story.  I got a recruiting DVD about TWLS. I didn’t really know what it was about, so I stuck it in my backpack, because I thought it was about the curriculum. When I eventually got time to watch the DVD, it talked about the school and how special it was. I called the founder, she invited me in, and I eventually got through a first interview. I didn’t want an interview at the time, but I went through a second one. I was then offered a job, and I declined, but she offered it to me again and I took it. I just finished my second year at TWLS.

What made you finally decide to come teach here then?
I loved philosophy of it, I like how small it is, I like the fact you’re not only a teacher, you’re also nurturing these kids in kind of a safe environment. TWLS is so different than public schools, you can hug the kids, it’s much more homey.

What kind of classes to you teach to the children at TWLS? Any specific age group?
I teach math, to all kids, from youngest to oldest. I also teach life skills, depending age-wise, or skills to make you independent as an adult including cooking, tying shoes, working with zippers. I also teach social skills to the older students mostly 13-18, such as budgeting, schedules, a vocational emphasis, and living on your own.

What makes working here the most rewarding?
Seeing the kids feel a sense of accomplishment and sense of success, even if that is coming in and seeing friends or filling out a resume. It’s seeing them going home feeling good about themselves. This past year it was pretty awesome to see how much progress the math class made. It was the middle group that had the most progress.

What kind of hobbies do you enjoy outside of teaching?
Oh my goodness, kayaking, coaching women’s cross country running, tenth seasons, spending time with my family (been married for 24 years with 3 kids). I like reading – any book by David Baldacci, and my favorite vacation spot is definitely the North Shore.

Every Wednesday afternoon, our special needs students can be found intently focused on learning to communicate without a single spoken word, with American Sign Language lessons taught by Debbie Lawrence, a certified Sign2Me instructor and veteran of 33 years of ASL teaching.

Lawrence is cheerful, energetic, and passionate about inspiring her students not only to learn to speak fluent ASL, but to use it as a channel to improve their social skills and sense of accomplishment. “What’s your happy?” she asks regularly, hoping her students will leave class exhilarated and satisfied as they practice their gestures together. On any given day, she might be explaining ASL grammar, leading the class in signed renditions of their favorite songs or working one-on-one with a student to help them grasp a sign.

ASL is the third most commonly spoken language in the US, after English and Spanish, and is especially valuable for special needs students with cognitive or language processing difficulties. Because it’s a visual language, it demands precision in gestures and motions, which means that a student struggling with kinesthesia – the sense of where his or her body is at any given moment – will have the chance to build those neural pathways every lesson. There are four components to any ASL sign:

1) Hand shape
2) Palm orientation
3)Location of gesture
4) Movement of gesture

All these components must be controlled together, since the same hand shape can mean many things when combined with different other elements. “I have found that the kinesthetic and tactile practice of the language is developing my students’ motor skills,” says Lawrence. Not only that, but the motor control required to make gestures consistently has helped students learn to focus. “[When I began to teach them, the kids] were all over the place,” she says. “‘It was like a game of musical chairs.’ Now they come in wanting to learn and excited to show off what they’ve learned. They’re so motivated to learn another language.”

Spatial visualization is also inherent in ASL communication. For example, to express “continent”, one might gesture in the shape of the continent, and to indicate a specific country, one might draw the continent, then indicate where on the continent it was located. Similarly, to show a bird in a tree, one might sign the tree shape, then point within the shape to the location of the bird – the person learning about the bird location wouldn’t have to look through all the branches, but would know at once where it was.

One of Debbie Lawrence’s most common techniques to teach spatial awareness with ASL is through signing nursery rhymes, something she describes as being “very much like drama contained in a stationary space.” A nursery rhyme as simple and charming as Little Miss Muffett, when signed, involves a spider descending gesture next to where the Little Miss Muffett gesture previously happened, to show where the two were and how close they sat. When Little Miss Muffett is shown frightened away, it is accompanied by an expression of terror and a rapid “running” gesture – that shows by its direction of motion which way she ran and how fast.

As a result of the intimate connection between ASL, focus, and motor control, learning to sign every week has been helping our students grow mentally and physically, as well as giving them a widely useful language to speak!

Join us again next week when we talk about how Debbie Lawrence and ASL came to The Whole Learning School, and what it’s meant for our students’ social skills and self-esteem.

Go on to Part 2 or Part 3.

What got you involved in TWLS?
I am one of the original parents from TWLS, and the only teacher who is also a parent. I heard about TWLS through Jennifer Lewin, a co-founder and former staff member. She invited me to the ice cream social!

So your daughter is a student with you at TWLS. Have you done any work prior to coming here related to working with special needs?
I got my master’s from the University of Minnesota to become a special education teacher. I’ve also previously worked in a DCD classroom in Burnsville and have other experience related to early childhood special education.

What do you like to do outside of teaching?
Playing with my kids, swimming, yoga, and ART! I really like drawing and painting. I love traveling, and my favorite place I’ve been to is Italy.

What kind of classes do you teach at TWLS?
Sensory integration classes – a combo of vestibular, proprioceptor, and tactile activities (activities relevant to maintaining equilibrium, body movements, and the sense of touch). Mixing these with the curricular pieces allow students to learn while getting their sensory needs met, which in turn gets them to focus longer.

What do you like most about working with the students at TWLS?
Seeing a student succeed and feel proud of what they have accomplished is the most rewarding part. I enjoyed this year’s holiday play and end of year showcase because the students can show off their abilities.

From Sarah Trout:

This week we are focusing on farm animals. 

We have had an energetic, silly, and animated week so far.  We have pretended to be several animals on the farm searching for letters, words, and pictures.  My students had to pick animals out of a mystery barn and verbally say the letter or dipthong that begins each one’s name.  It was a fan game and the kids loved it – and got better at letter-sound linking!

We had one of the students pretend to gallop around on a horse singing “Down on the Farm”, and every time the student called out the name of an animal “on the farm”, the rest of the class had to find it and spell its name.  They lauged and were silly – it was exciting for me to see them have so much fun with this theme.

Also, we made Farm Joke Books.  Our favorite joke was:

Q: “Where do sheep go to get their haircut?”
A: “At the Baa Baa shop!”

Here’s our own little farm on campus:

On Tuesday, we went on a field trip to a farm in Osceola, Wisconsin.  Ruth Cracraft took some great pictures of the farm:

From Sarah Trout:

Planes, Trains, Cars, and Boats!  This week we are focusing on transportations.  We are reading about, categorizing, and interacting with a variety of forms of transportation.

We made blue tracks on the classroom floor, and our yellow train had to stay on the tracks.  There were two stops the train had to make to pick up its freight, consisting of “train letters”.  One student sat inside the train car as the conductor, and the other student pulled them on the tracks while making two stops.  The conductor told the puller which letter they needed first alphabetically, and the puller had to find it and put it in the train.  Next, they stopped at the train station to unload the freight and switch roles.  After all the letters were picked up, they had to put them in ABC order at the train station.  This activity was a blast, and at the same time the students worked on their spatial and body awareness, their responses to verbal cues and social interactions, their ability to associate certain sounds with the corresponding written letter, and proper ABC order.

We are going to do a number of other obstacle courses this week, all centered around picking up letters and placing them in the proper order.

Recess at TWLS:

Kite-flying has become somewhat of a lost art these days; computers and other inside games have usually taken the place of going to the part with friends and a kite.  We’re delighted that we can share the fun of launching and flying a kite with our students.