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I loved my time teaching students on the spectrum over zoom last year. It was a great opportunity to hone a skillset that I had not had a reason to build up until I was asked to teach some students in Arizona who were utilizing the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program.

In the M.Ed. program I graduated from, we were given quite a bit of training in behavior modification, but it was all very hands-on and face-to-face. COVID-19 gave so many teachers the unplanned and uncharted opportunity to practice online education. It was hard for so many of us to jump into such a different form of educating, especially for the elementary school age kiddos and their teachers. They benefit from face-to-face interactions in ways that are difficult to duplicate in any other environment.

I taught small classes which was an enormous advantage. As any teacher can tell you, having a large class is daunting when your students have very specific learning and classroom behavior modification needs. My small classes allowed me to get to know my students even faster than if I would have had twenty or more students in my classes.

We took time at the start of each day playing some get-to-know you games, solving silly riddles, and completing fun puzzles. These games brought out each student’s personality and helped me to pinpoint the individual currency of each child… and this was key to creating plans for each student. Some of the kids were driven by their ability to lead their peers. Some were motivated by point systems and “child specific” rewards. Other students were driven by time earned to read as a class. There are so many different ways to motivate and help mold behaviors.

With kiddos on the spectrum, we found that looking at a screen with their faces reflected back, was hard for some students. There are tons of great ways to troubleshoot this issue. Some students wanted to turn off their cameras, but for me that was not an acceptable option. I needed to see that students where in their seats and have the ability to check in with each student at any given moment. So, some of the students turned off their ability to see anyone except the person speaking. One of my students was very distracted by seeing his face and refocusing his attention was difficult. So, I had this one student pick an avatar each day, and that was what he saw when he looked at his screen while answering questions. One day he was a dog and the next a squirrel. It was fantastically entertaining for me and his classmates, and it did not set him off to see his avatar looking back at him when he felt compelled to share or answer questions. There are so many ways to get around struggles and meet the needs of students and their teachers.

I’m incredibly excited to be giving away three books over the next two weeks. Leave a message here to be entered in the drawing, and I will contact the winners through email. Entry deadline is June 30^th and winners will be announced July 10^th.

Okay, all you math people…please don’t be offended by this statement, but math is boring. Maybe that’s why we are told to count sheep to fall asleep—it’s coma inducing. Apparently this disdain for math is the dominant gene, because I’m married to a banker who got his undergrad in accounting and his master’s in business banking. I’m snoring just thinking about what he does every single day at work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful he loves numbers. But I obviously passed this horrid, math despising, genetic curse onto all three of my children. On the upside, a love for all things science is also dominant and my children inherited that from yours truly too.

I think part of the trouble, with math, is the way workbook pages and flashcards have taken over. There is nothing exciting about workbook pages…for any subject. But math seems to have gotten the short end of the “fun stick” when it comes to traditional education. Thankfully, homeschooling affords us the time and freedom to take some seriously amazing field trips. Our latest experience actually made math interesting to all four of the math adverse individuals in our family.

My husband, our three kids, and I went to iFly, an indoor skydiving facility, and my children actually had the chance to fly indoors. And yes, this experience turned into an incredible hands-on math lesson. Because my kids love to learn, they ask an enormous number of questions wherever we go. I’m sure some of the other participants were less interested in the air flow pattern to the flight tube and the inherent strength of the mesh flooring, but my kids were intrigued. The instructor was more than willing to spend extra time with my kiddos and explained how four turbine engines, located above the flight tube, suck a tremendous amount of air through a system of chambers that make four sharp 90 degree angle turns, passing over a cooling system, so your flight doesn’t resemble a freefall over the Sahara. The air is then sucked back up through the turbines and starts the process all over.

We learned that even though it feels like the iFly system is “blowing” the flyer upwards, the reality is you are actually “sucked” upwards. It was fun to watch the monitor as it changed the wind speed based on the size of each of my kids. For some reason this whole experience reminded me of the movie “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” when Charlie and his grandfather are floating around and have to burp in order to descend, but that was not the way my kids made their way back to the mesh flooring inside the tube. The whole experience took about an hour and a half. Each of the kids only flew for two minutes, the rest of the time was spent learning about the system and how each little body movement impacts the way your body ascends or descends.

I remember sitting in math classes and wondering how any of the information I was learning would be useful in life outside the classroom. If I would have known that there was potential, within all those numbers, for me to actually fly without wings…I would surely have paid closer attention. I want my kids to have the ability to see how math is used in everyday life. I want them to understand how math is used in finances, construction, and every other aspect of our existence. I want them to be excited to learn about numbers. If they know that each worksheet will take them closer to understanding how to create amazing machines, I’m pretty sure there will be a little less resistance when it is time to do the less exciting math work. I have a long way to go in order to get them prepared to live on their own, but each “aha” moment takes us one step closer to creating a foundation of information that they can draw from as they encounter new experiences.