Module 3

I have interacted with our speech and language pathologists Beth.  She works with 2 of our pre-schoolers twice a week.  I ask her how she felt poverty and health affected our children.  She had an article for me that would help me with my research paper.  We also talked about a boy (Fred) that she was working with that was at poverty level.  He never came to school clean and was always having accidents in his pants.  She felt that this was affecting his chances of learning or paying attention when she was working with him. 

Some of the challenges that are noticeable are that the children are dirty and do have a hard time concentrating on the task at hand.  The children that I observed had a hard time sitting still, the teacher and pathologists thinks that this could be an affect of their home life and what they are missing.  A challenge of making things better for the child is that the parents do not seem to care.  They are happy with their family lifestyle just the way it is.  There is a cycle that is hard to break, when children are raised in povery level homes, they usually end of with the same lifestyle that their parents have.

Blog 2

I work at a Pre-K program at the grade school in Oblong.  When I started my job the supervisor talked with me about how important it is to make the children and parents feel welcome in your classroom.  So to start the day off, I talk with each child as they enter the door and also say hello to the parents.  Some of our parents stay and visit each morning, this gives us a chance to discuss information  about the child.  If there is a problem, the parents can let us know what is going on and how we can help them at school. 

How do we get parents become more involved with what is going on with their children?  Why is parental involvement so hard for some people?  These questions could be used as focus questions, they are so very important to keep us on task and lead us in the right direction.