Wednesday, 29 October 2014

Workaround Teaching

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, the term 'workaround' means this.

"A workaround is a bypass of a recognized problem in a system. A workaround is typically a temporary fix that implies that a genuine solution to the problem is needed. But workarounds are frequently as creative as true solutions, involving outside the box thinking in their creation."

Throughout my working life - before the kids - I was always one of those employees you could throw a curly problem at and as long as I knew what the desired outcome was, I could usually come up with a solution. Sometimes, these solutions were a bit different and not necessarily the way most people would do it, but in most cases they worked. In my last job at a vet practice, my boss and I loved finding different ways to get around our very user unfriendly clinic software to achieve the outcomes we wanted. The software designers obviously had no clue how a vet practice worked in real life and we wondered if they had ever actually set foot in a practice. We joked about our workarounds and believe me, there were quite a few.

Today it occurred to me that what I am doing with Sam is exactly that. Creating workarounds. Sam's condition, 22Q 11.2 distal deletion syndrome, has resulted in a number of systems issues. He is not wired like a typical child and that means to achieve the same educational outcome, I need to think creatively when devising a teaching solution. The Wikipedia workaround definition does go on to say "Typically they [workarounds] are considered brittle in that they will not respond well to further pressure from a system beyond the original design. In implementing a workaround it is important to flag the change so as to later implement a proper solution."

Unfortunately, there is no permanent solution to Sam's system problem. He is the way he is. We can't replace the missing genetic pieces. So the workarounds I create with him - in daily life and at school - will be true solutions. I need to think 'outside the box'.

After a trip to the park this morning, we worked on our Sight Words, which also involved a cutting exercise. Sam had to say and match the sight words with the sheet and then glue them on.
I had written sentences using the sight words and we read them together. Then I asked him to find any sight words in the sentence and highlight them.

He really did get 100%. He got every one!
Next, we worked on Days of the Week. I had created a story page and a page where he had to trace the day names.
Sam has struggled grasping the concept of different day names. I needed to work on this.
We played a Days of the Week app from LudoSchool.com. It's a simple app, but he loved it!
He got all the questions right...on his own. And you can see how excited he was.
Time for Maths...with Minecraft. Sam is crazy about Minecraft, so I downloaded images and found a Minecraft font.
Adding with Minecraft :)
I made a Minecraft counting book from 1 to 20. We did 1 to 11 today. I found 'tracing fonts' so Sam can practice writing his numbers and letters.
And here is adding with Minecraft. I rely on Sam to tell me who all the characters are.

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