Takeaway's - Class 2 - April 25th, 2020

Three takeaway's from the entire class:

• The reading process slideshow was interesting. Reading comes natural to me and I never think about what I am doing when I am reading or writing. It just happens. I actually found it hard to break down the steps of what I was doing because that is so unnatural for me to do. It is hard to explain each little step of what I am doing when I never think of it like that. The only time I really stop to think when I am reading is if I come across a word that I am not familiar with. Sometimes I may look it up, or sometimes I may reread the sentence to get the context surrounding the word to see if I can figure out what it means on my own. 

• When using the site "Through Your Child's Eyes", I became very frustrated. I chose a student in grade 11 who had writing difficulties. When it came to having to do the activity myself, I ran out of time because I was trying to go back and fix all of the mistakes. It was so frustrating because even though I knew that I was typing the right words, my computer was putting in different things. By the end I was scrambling to finish and yelling at my scream that that wasn't what I wrote. I can only imagine how students feel who have writing difficulties after doing that activity. It really makes you take a step back and put yourself in their shoes. I have a student who we do journal writing with and she has trouble with writing. She often goes down over the line that she is writing on and her printing is hard to read. We have started getting her to type her journal on the computer instead and it has made it a lot easier for her. Experiment it yourself here: Through Your Child's Eyes

• I thought that the eye simulator website was really neat. It was really "eye-opening" because you could see the world from another person's eyes. It made me really aware and sad because my pop had both cataracts and glaucoma so now I finally understand what he struggled with daily. It was also really frustrating to try to read something through that simulation because you really couldn't see anything. I cannot imagine having to deal with that every day and not be able to read. It is something that I definitely take for granted. Try it out for yourself here: Eyesight Simulator.