Jenna Gabel
Teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
"Love - Sign" by Cindy Andrie is liscensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Star Student Work From Mrs. Gabel's Class
This is one of my favorite parts of my portfolio because it is here that I have the opportunity to show off some of my students' work! It is very important to me that my students have the opportunity to exercise their creativity in the classroom through the use of authentic tasks which they can directly apply to their own lives.
Self Advocacy Skills:
As deaf and hard of hearing students, the children in my classroom have different needs than their hearing peers. I am not always in their classrooms so they need to be responsible for advocating for their own needs. At the beginning of every school year, each student and I sit down with their teacher and explain their hearing loss and the accomodations that they will need in order to be successful in their classroom. This year, the students made a video for their general education teachers that will help them to understand the classroom needs of deaf and hard of hearing students.
Vocabulary:
Students who are deaf and hard of hearing often miss or misunderstand information as a result of their hearing loss. Consequently, all of my students have deficits in the area of vocabulary. In my classroom, we make time for many authentic vocabulary learning tasks. The following is a favorite vocabulary activity for both me and my students. Each week, students go on a scavenger hunt in to find one word that they learned in class some place in their environment at home. Students take these pictures of these words with classroom cameras and bring them back to school every Thursday. The children then share the pictures that they found with their classmates, and they are posted to our classroom website. This activity shows students that the vocabulary words that they are learning are not just meant for school, but they are applicable in their outside lives as well.
Students also used the app Pic Collage to make digital photos of the new vocabulary words that they were learning!
Digital Reports:
For this assignment, students were asked to gather a variety of resources (books, videos, websites, and other multimedia) to become an expert in a topic that was of interest to them. The students then had to come up with a way to share what they had learned with their classmates. This particular student decided to create a digital story to teach others about famous astronauts.