Week Five 3/16/16

Welcome back to my blog!

As March progresses forward, my schedule seems to become more busy. With college decision dates, my concert with the Phoenix Symphony, and All-State auditions, I’m constantly on edge and have trouble finding time to rest. Nevertheless, I have taken refuge to going to SEEDs every week. Now that a little over a month has passed by, I have created many relationships and will only continue to do so.

Also, VERY exciting news. I received my fingerprint clearance card! The card that legally allows me to work directly with these students (not that I have been interacting with them illegally…) and give MaryAnn approval for me to be around the students. This card required a 6-week waiting period; however, mine came in surprisingly early!

This week I worked alongside MaryAnn to teach two students, Jonatan and Andy, about emotions, coping skills, and personal goals. Jonatan tends to ramble on and on about his thoughts and has a difficult time listening to whoever is talking to him. He mumbles a lot of his words and has poor enunciation. I’ve talked about Andy before in previous blog posts, but just in case you guys forgot, Andy is the nonverbal stellar student who has great focus and works meticulously. However, Andy’s OCD causes him to constantly be distracted by imperfections and has a hard time keeping his hands to himself and his own work space.

MaryAnn and I started with writing some emotions: happy, sad, scared, angry, etc. We made both students express the emotions on their face. From here, we transitioned to positive emotions and negative emotions. MaryAnn wanted to get to a point where she could talk about anxiety and stress. We all feel anxious and stressed out, but unlike most people, these students don’t exactly know how to handle these emotions. Therefore, MaryAnn taught them easy steps to cope with uncomfortable situations. First, stop what you are doing and take moment to breathe. Then, remind yourself and say, “ I can do this!” We might automatically do this, but by breaking it down for these students, they can process the information easily and use it in the future. Jonatan caught on to the three steps really easily and in fact really enjoyed doing them.

However, it was interesting to see Andy be very active in this class. After expressing the different emotions on his face, he was also very verbal and proceeded to say all of the steps as well.

All of the students are improving their communication and social skills every week and it is really exciting to be a part of it all!

Thanks for reading and talk to you guys soon!

Grace