Jaclyn Fishler

10/11/15
SERP 407B
Modification Assignment
After volunteering in a classroom for a couple of weeks, I feel that I have been gaining an
excellent experience working with children. I have worked with all ages of children in a life
skills classroom that range from moderate to severe disabilities. I decided to modify a student
named Sarah; she is a senior in high school and she has Down syndrome. When I initially spoke
to Sarah, her disability was only slightly evident because she is a sufficient communicator. She
knows how to verbally express her feelings in an explicit way, she makes eye contact with me
most of the time, and she knows how to hold a conversation. However, Sarah has difficulties
with completing her academics, so I volunteered to help her with an assignment.
When I assisted in a high school last week, the students were instructed to write thank
you cards. Last week, the students had a Gala held at their high school in which each club
presented their outstanding work. The bell work for the assignment was Think back to the Gala?
What was something you enjoyed? The teacher listed eight different clubs on the board to give
students options to choose from, such as the car club, art club, dance club, picture club, etc. The
teacher used one of the students cards from the prior year as an example to facilitate the
assignment for the class. Each student was handed a blank card that they had to fill out and they
asked for assistance when necessary.

This is the letter that was used as a model for the class.

To begin with, I asked Sarah how to start a letter and she was uncertain. I told her that she
must always start a letter with the word Dear and then the persons name of whom she is
writing to, but she didnt comprehend because she had difficulties with spelling the words. I
decided to use a white board as a material to model the writing for Sarah so that she could gain a
better comprehension. I noticed that Sarah has expressive difficulties with writing, considering
she needs help with constructing sentences, understanding grammar, and understanding
vocabulary. I clearly repeated the sentences to Sarah as many times as she needed until she fully
understood. When we worked on vocabulary, I asked her to sound out each letter with me while I
pointed at the words on the white board so that she could see the correct format. I also noticed
that Sarah had complications with the orientations of her letters. As an example, she often
thought that the letter d was written as the letter b. To help Sarah remember the correct
orientation, I wrote each individual letter on the white board, one step at a time, as she repeated
my instructions on her letter. Several of the students wrote 2-3 sentences that didnt come out to
be adequately constructed because they just wanted to complete the full assignment before the
period ended. For Sarah, I only gave her the requirement of writing one full adequate sentence.
By decreasing the amount of sentences for Sarah to write, I believe that this improved her
expressive writing skills because she is now aware of what a well-constructed sentence is
supposed to look and sound like. When Sarah completed the letter, I told her to read it aloud so
that she could not only see it, but hear it.

This is the material that I used when I modeled the handwriting, sentence structure, spelling, and
letter format for Sarah.