While most of my students are general education students, I also daily teach one section of special education and self-contained students. These students usually create smaller classroom environments and open up opportunities to doing some very interesting projects!
I work in a very poor, urban school district where the majority of the students are on the free meal program and a large number are from broken homes.
I teach primarily 7th and 8th grade students but I also teach a 6-8th grade special ed and self-contained class that I see every day and that changes quarterly. They are a wonderful set of students that are typically very enthusiastic and eager to learn! They have a wide range of physical and mental disabilities and their curriculum often needs to be modified to fit their needs. Class sizes range from only a few students up to 12 and, because of the smaller class sizes, I am able to create unusual projects that I could never do with a larger general education classroom. I LOVE teaching this group of kids! They are SO enthusiastic and they love the special attention they get from a smaller classroom setting.
My Project
My special ed students will be learning about sculpture and design by doing a body casting project! They will learn about what body casting is and how other artists have used it to create fantastic sculptures that share a message about who the artist is. Students are going to learn how to mix and use the casting material to make a sculpture of their hands using plaster of paris. They will decide on a pose for their hands and what they will be trying to "say" with both the pose and the sculpture they create with it. They will also paint their hand sculptures and think of an environment for them to be displayed in or textures that could be added to it in order to help relay their message. Through this assignment, students will learn not only how to use a new material, but they will learn how to express an idea through sculpture.
Expressing ideas, both verbally and symbolically can be very difficult for special education students and students with disabilities.
My hope is that through this assignment my students will be able to work through some ideas that they have struggled with expressing in the past. They also sometimes feel less successful than their general education peers. This project will allow them to create something that is special and unique and that no general education students will be doing.
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