Teaching faith practices to kids with special needs

    SAN ANTONIO • Participants in Mary Campa’s Camp ACC workshop played with “joy sticks,” used a parachute and “surfed a wave.” It was all in a morning’s work for participants in the workshop, “Teaching Faith Practices to Children with Special Needs Through Music, Movement and Sensory Integration,” which offered helpful strategies for effectively teaching faith practices to children with a variety of physical and emotional learning disabilities. The workshop took place in the chancery as part of the Archdiocesan Catechetical Center’s summer Catechetical Leadership Development training program.
Teaching the workshop was Mary Campa, a 1993 University of Texas Health Science Center graduate in occupational therapy and former therapist with the Early Childhood Intervention Programs through the Freedom Center, who is currently an occupational therapist with the San Antonio Independent School District. She and husband, Deacon Jerry Campa, serve in ministry at St. Mary Magdalen Parish.

    Attendees included parish religious education teachers, as well as teachers in both Catholic and public schools, all eager to learn how to effectively teach to children with a wide range of special needs, including those with ADD/ADHD (attention-deficit disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and sensory integration dysfunction.
Campa started off by leading the Camp ACC students through a prayer exercise in which they imagined themselves as the chronically ill woman in the gospel of Mark, who sought to touch Jesus’ garment. Campa likened the plight of the continually ill woman to the child with learning disabilities who constantly feels different from other students and whose teachers need to be able to make them feel good about themselves.
    Campa pointed out the importance of recognizing children’s different learning styles, which include concrete and abstract perceivers, as well as active and reflective processors.
    “We don’t want to say ‘Is this child smart enough to learn?’ ” she said. “We want to say, ‘How is this child smart?’ ”
    Concrete perceivers need to jump right in and “feel it, touch it, smell it,” said Campa, while abstract thinkers take in information through analysis, observation and thinking. Active processors make sense of a new experience by immediately using the new information; reflective processors like to reflect and think about it. Traditional schools favor the abstract/reflective mode, but this ignores half of a student’s brain.
    “The left side of the brain does logic, sequence, rational, analytical, objective and looks at each little part,” noted Campa. “The right side does the random, the intuitive, the holistic, the subjective and looks at the whole.” Most individuals have a distinct preference and workshop students got to take a test to discover which half of their brains was dominant. “We’re gearing our kids in school to do the logical … we’ve cut out a lot of those right-brained things… the feeling and jumping and running,” said Campa.

    Special needs children tend to have difficulty in several areas and Campa offered suggestions on how to meet their needs. For difficulty attending to tasks, make the task shorter and more stimulating; for difficulty transitioning to the next activity, involve movement (sensory integration). If unable to sit still, try having the class vary their sitting positions during the lesson, and for inability to follow through with directions, give shorter directions and involve a physical action. To help in recalling information, tie in a strong visual.
     To optimize learning for children with special needs, Campa recommended noticing the child’s learning difficulty; developing good communication with parents, observing the child’s strengths and learning style; using visuals and hands-on materials; providing meaningful breaks to energize and revitalize; building self-esteem with positive feedback; making skills valid and usable; and incorporating concrete and active teaching methods that involve doing, sensing, feeling and action.
    “Music, art and movement are three of the ways to enforce concrete and active learning,” Campa added, and proceeded to involve participants in a series of fun exercises they could bring back to their classrooms, including shaking plastic eggs as rattles and singing and acting out the verses to If You’re Happy and You Know It (clap your hands). Here participants got to add their own faith-related verses as well, with one of the more creative being, “If you feel the love of Jesus, surf a wave!”
    
    A brightly colored parachute was whisked out for an interactive story-telling of Noah’s Ark, with participants enthusiastically acting out the story and choosing an animal to portray. Next came dancing around the room to music while waving “joy sticks” — creations made from pencils, rubber bands and colorful crepe paper streamers.
    After this the class broke up into small groups to create and perform their own classroom activities that could involve a child’s senses in the learning process. In closing, Campa reminded participants, “You’re giving the kids the tools they need to get to the ‘pearly gates.’ ”