How Wild is Your School Connects with Student with Disablities

Last Thursday, Eric and Kristin were leading a How Wild is Your School program .  They were presenting our Water Keepers module to 3-6^th graders.  In one class they had a boy with a learning and attention disability.  During a good part of the program he seemed disengaged.  So much that at one point he was pulling himself along the tops of the lab tables.  The other students did not seem to pay any attention to him.  While the behavior seemed odd to Eric, and it was not distracting the other students, he chose to ignore the behavior and engage the student as he could.  At the end of each program we have an in depth time of review.  Most of the class seemed to grasp the concepts discussed that day.  Eric did not expect much from the one boy, but to his surprise he was on top of the concepts for the day.  While he seemed distracted and not paying attention, in his own way he was participating and absorbing the material.  Since he was not being forced to mold to a preconceived idea of how to learn, but was allowed to experience and participate in a way that worked for him, he was able to grasp the material being taught.  This was yet another reinforcement of why Camptown uses hands on interactive experiences to teach youth.