Autistically Silly

In my classroom this year the I have had the opportunity every intern envys of others, but fears for themselves.

An Autistic child.

While this does not really seem all that scary, it really was terrifying. Who knew such a small little girl could intimidate me so much? The first week in my classroom I was in constant fear that I was not doing or saying the right things to accomodate her. The first week I remember thinking never did I imagine that the very first classroom I would be thrown in would present sucha challenge. However this opportunity has presented itself at first scary, but now to be so rewarding.

After getting to know my autistic child and really take the time to get to know her, what she likes and dislikes and her interests I have become so passionate not only about this child's learning experience. She provides so much joy in the classroom and her giggle completely lights up my day. She has one of the very best hearts and her silly, upbeat attitude brings so much good energy to the classroom. At first I thought of her to be so scary, but- Suprise!- She is just like any other child. She is a normal six-year-old who has a wild love for cats and dreams of dinosaurs.

This is a picture of one of the assignments my students were assigned today in class. In this question they were supposed to form a subtraction sentence out of the numbers 8, 5 and 3 while representing the sentence with a shape. Most of the other children drew circles and turned their paper in quickly. But not this little girl. She used yet another opportunity to show her uniqueness by representing her sentence with cats, which just so happens to be her favorite animal.

This is just a small representation of why I have grown to love this little girl already. I cannot wait to see how much we grow from each other and to see her blossom in the classroom!