To the First Grade Team at my children's elementary school,
I just wanted to thank you for the way you handled the timeline assignment. Although X isn’t adopted, his sisters are and the timeline project is one of the projects that adoptive (and foster) families dread. In many cases there are not photos of the children from infancy or even sometimes for years beyond infancy. There are not always people who know when the child first sat up, or took their first steps, or what their first word was. Rather than a timeline consisting of milestones (when you walked, talked, etc) the children can simply select anything that would represent that year of their life. Your assignment is general enough that is allows all children, even those who are missing large parts of their personal history to complete their timeline. In addition, rather than requiring photos, you allowed children to draw or otherwise represent these events. Often in these assignments, all of the other kids have photos and the child who doesn’t is told to “just draw something”. You included those options initially so drawing isn’t a “consolation” activity, but an actual option. Since my other children will also be faced with this assignment I wanted to thank you for creating it in a way that is responsive to the family situations of all children.
3 comments:
That's a great way to handle this assignment! I remember my now-7-year-old doing some "baby" project in Kindergarten and my first adopted child hits K this fall. I may steal these ideas and give them to the K team when we go register! Thanks!
That's awesome that they put some thought into this so it could be inclusive!
I love your proactive response. All too often we forget to applaud teachers when they are doing it right. Thanks for the reminder that we should!
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