I'm thinking about Thayer today. In the classroom this morning, he had trouble with the clapping exercise. Most others were able to pick up on the patterns easily. A few others were a bit slow to catch on, but caught up relatively quickly. Thayer, on the other hand, started grabbing his face, something I have noticed he does when he is nervous. He say every other children clapping and slapping their thighs in rhythm along with the pattern, and it overwhelmed him. He put his hands over his ears and screamed.
Angelle spoke to him calmly and asked the entire class to slow down. She spoke to Thayer about what they were doing: "Clap clap, pat pat. It's an AA BB pattern." He attempted to catch up, to follow the pattern. He had a look of concentration. He was trying very hard. He started flailing and grew discouraged.
This has happened before that I've witnessed: that he's has not be able to do something others could. At morning meeting last week, I believe, the class was writing numbers on individual paddle white boards. He tried, first of all, to think of the answer to Angelle's math problem. I have seen Thayer accomplish mountainous, impressive problems when he is focused, so I knew if he stopped and thought it through, he would reach the answer. He became very aware that he was further behind than his classmates. Angelle had moved on to another problem, and the questions were getting backlogged. I came over to him and slowed him down. Have learning issues, I occasionally get overwhelmed when the teacher moves on before I am reading, before I've grasped the first piece. It makes me want to just scream, "Slow down!" but I see I am the only one struggling. Like me, if Thayer was given enough time to think through the problems, he could find the answers. He needed to focus on getting his twos and fives the correct way, and he was putting the number four before the one in the number fourteen. I sat with him and had him write the numbers a second time, so the answers were correct, and then we would move on to the next question. This occurence made me wonder if Thayer has learning issues, which I would only be able to recognize because I have similar disabilities and am surrounded by SLD students daily. (However, I acknowledge this is by no means a diagnosis, and there are real professionals who know what they are talking about much more than I do.) I figured, perhaps, that same could be done with this clapping exercise. However, even when giving more time to work slowly, he was not able to get it.
I was happy to sit in on a conversation between Angelle and Tara about what type of learner he is and what might work for him. He is a very smart child once focused. However, he also has some sort of sensory problems. He has begun OT. Angelle described him as "stimulation seeking," saying that there are three sensory issues a child could have: understimulation, overstimulation, and stimulation seeking.
I saw this to be true when I followed the class to Music. I he first started pulling at his cheeks, something I've witnessed him doing before, and something Tara identified in our conversation. I sat next to him and noticed he was snapping a rubber band onto his wrist repeatedly. I spot to him about this, asked him why he was doing it, and told him to stop. He continued a minute later, so I took the rubber band away from him. Later, he then started punching himself in his cheeks with a closed fist, something Tara mentioned he was caught doing in an after school program one day. He is clearly seeking stimulation, but why? Angelle described it as a coping mechanism, but coping for what? Is it related to his slow work speed (and possible learning disabilities)? Perhaps I need to ask Mel, the OT specialist, a few questions...
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