Understanding Body Language
Special Education teachers attending our Interactive Whiteboard Learning Communities have the opportunity to co-plan and co-teach with an Itinerant Resource Teacher (IRT).
Recently, Ms. Clark from Secord Elementary School, planned an engaging social skills lesson on the Promethean board with IRT Andrea Statton.
Using Magic Ink in ActivInspire, students slowly revealed an image and then they were asked some critical thinking questions. For example, how is the girl feeling? Where is the girl? What do you think happened right before this picture was taken? Each time the students responded, they had to justify their answer by annotating on the image or by further explaining their inference.
Once the entire image was revealed the students were asked to review their inferences to see if they made sense. In the picture below, the students had made some predictions that the picture was taken in a castle, school, house and hotel. They crossed off the castle as an option after looking at the entire picture; they thought the school made the most sense. They used clues from the picture (e.g., the type of stairs and flooring) to help them decide.
With another picture, students used the camera tool to capture snapshots of the larger image to identify body language in the image to help them understand how the individuals were feeling. They concluded that the two boys in the background were making faces and laughing at the boy in the foreground. After analyzing the body language of the child in the foreground and using their own experiences, they predicted that he was crying.
Through the use of these images and the tools in ActivInspire, the students were able to begin to identify another person’s body language and feelings to support their own personal development. Ms. Clark plans on extending this social skills lesson by having her students role play how to resolve conflicts such as teasing.
