Valdine’s Grade Two Class

Valdine teaches Grade Two at Riverside School. Constructed in the early 1900s, it is a big, old, brick building with a large (600+) student population from Kindergarten to Grade Seven. It is situated in a socio-economically, ethnically and culturally diverse area with students coming from a myriad of backgrounds from single family dwellings, apartments, rentals suites and large, extended family housing situations. The school is not identified as an inner city school yet has many characteristics of one.

Valdine’s classroom is an average-sized, drab coloured room. The furniture is old. The desks are a mix of mostly old-fashioned tubular ones with a half dozen new ones (separate desks and chairs). Student desks were rearranged into groupings based either on topics students had chosen or careful teacher consideration of personalities and anticipation of the best working situation. There are only two large tables where children could work collectively, a round one at the front of the room and an oblong one at the back. There is a large carpeted area at the front of the room with shelves of reference books and hundreds of picture books and early chapter books. A display table at the front of the room changes frequently at the whim of both the teacher and the students.

Participating in Valdine’s research were nineteen students, eleven boys and eight girls. More than eight different ethnicities and first languages were represented in this class. Of these nineteen students, there were four learners with Ministry-designated special needs: one hearing impaired, one diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), a child with autism, and a child diagnosed with severe learning disabilities. There were at least five other students waiting for testing to determine other special learning needs. Two of these were likely to fall in the range of giftedness and three were likely to be found to have language processing problems. An additional child was also in the process of going through testing and interventions for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). There was an EA assigned to the child with autism. It was a class full of personalities and delightful peculiarities.