This semester during my internship at Paul V Fly elementary school I set a goal of becoming more comfortable and confident

in individual meetings with students. I worked with my site supervisors to make agendas for the six-week sessions with each of the eight individuals I met with. I learned that in order to better help the students I need to get as much data from teachers, parents, and any other people involved in the students academic life. Once I had all the information gathered and understood where the student was struggling I was able to prepare for my individual sessions with the students. I worked with four students, each dealing with the divorce of their parents. We worked on how they felt about the divorce in general, how it changes their life, and coping skills for grief. Divorce can be considered a lost and when I used worksheets that helped outline the stages of grief the students seemed to be able to speak and work through which every stage they were on. The basic stages of grief that I used were from PsychCentral.com written by Julie Axelrod called, The Five Stages of Loss and Grief. Stage one was Denial and Isolation, stage two Anger, Stage three Bargaining, Stage four Depression and stage five Acceptance. Some of the children did not go through all the stages with me. However I did have one student who I ended up meeting with eight times opposed to the traditional six due to the fact that she was really struggling with isolation. Her father had expressed concern about her having no friends her own age. After our first session I also was concerned with her isolation due to the divorce. We worked for two sessions on why having friends can help during this difficult time and why having fun with friends keeps us healthy. At the start of this semester I had never conducted a classroom guidance or therapy lesson. I had learned about them during my group class at Gwynedd Mercy University but not yet had a chance to conduct one my self. At the school where I did my internship they have a school wide behavior program, Fly 200 Club, which teaches the importance of taking care of self, taking care of others and taking care of things. When students are caught doing this to a superior expectation they are rewarded with a blue ticket that they then take to the main office and are signed into a logbook and also the tickets are put onto a board. Their parents are notified that they were rewarded for taking care of self, things and others. Once we fill all 200 spots the board with blue tickets one row of 10 students is chosen at random to have a reward. This reward can be anything from a movie after school, to a hour of board games and snacks, or a Nintendo Wii party. As a part of this program they use the book Fill a Bucket: a guide to daily happiness for young children by Carrol and Martin McCloud. I shadowed my head counselor with reading the book and teaching the message of the book to the kindergarteners. Then I made a smart board presentation (see skills/content tab) to review/re-teach the entire second grade the book. I had to schedule with the second grade team of teachers when it would work for me to come teach a classroom guidance lesson for their classrooms. My favorite thing about this practicum experience was leading classroom guidance lessons every Wednesday twice a day for the emotional support classrooms. In the mornings I would have the emotional support classroom with the third and fourth grade students. We worked on anger management, self-control, and impulse control and relaxation techniques. Some of the characteristics of students with emotional and behavioral disorders are adverse effects on children's academic ability, antisocial behavior, unable to form social relationships, extreme externalizing or internalizing. Many of the children that I work with in my internship need emotional support in some way. I have been conducting groups with the third and fourth grade emotional support classroom every week and these children have extreme mood swings. They have all suffered from some sort of trauma, from parents having substance abuse issues to poverty, or physical abuse. Some of the externalizing behaviors I have seen getting out of their seats, yell, talk out, disturb peers, temper tantrums and curse to mention a few. I have seen more however these are just the ones I see the most.

As I mentioned above I have seen temper tantrums, from crying to running around the school and attempting to rip artwork off the walls. In the movie clip the narrator defines immaturity in students with these disorders by displaying the following behaviors: in appropriate crying, tempter tantrums, and poor coping skills. Most of these students do a combination of these behaviors. The poor coping skills can lead to low self-esteem and lack of self worth, which according to the video can lead to worse problem down the line, as they get older. Lastly I spent a large majority of my time during internship doing assessments. At Paul V Fly we used KBIT2 and Naglieri assessments as screening for referral of special education services or gifted programs. I loved being apart of this process. If a general education teacher thinks that a student needs special education there are multiple steps that need to be taken first. The general education teacher must do a pre-referral assessment and intervention. A pre-referral assessment is usually informal observations and gathering of information about the student to help develop a pre-referral intervention program. These types of programs are commonly used to help the students with in the classroom so that no referral has to be made. In the school I am interning at we use a CSAP system for pre-referrals. Our teachers must try tier one and tier two methods of interventions before making a referral. Tier one are intervention the teacher makes for the student with in the group of the class. Tier two is specific interventions for a student. We used a chart during our pre-referral assessments to help teachers with the assessment and data. If a referral does need to be made the teacher must submit all of the data and information that they collected during the pre-referral intervention program. Then the student will go for screenings to see if they meet the requirements for special education. After the special education intervention is implemented it must be evaluated which is done by making sure the criteria in which the student was referred for is improving.