Why You Should be Teaching Special Needs Students

My special needs students are the sweetest souls to teach. Unlike most JHS Japanese learners of English, they’re not shy to learn or speak English, they cheer me on loudly with their eagerness to please and participate.

When I was first assigned to teach them I was very apprehensive because I had little or no experience teaching SEN students but the teachers did well to introduce me to the students first during lunch time right before the English lesson. Oooh, that has been my best lunchtime engagement to date. One student was at the door to receive me, another pulled out a chair for me in a very gentlemanly way that put me totally at ease. At first glance, it was difficult to tell just how special they are, except for the very obvious ones of course, but interacting and spending time with them has shown me just how lucky I am to have these ones as my students. They have my heart and I'm letting them keep it. 

So far I’ve had three lessons with them. The first one was when I had my self-introduction lesson where only three students actively listened to me talk about Nigeria. However, the enthusiasm of those three totally made up for their classmates who were not in the mood that day. During the second lesson, I learned not to introduce a “competitive game” as one of the students had a bad meltdown when she lost.

The third lesson today got me feeling all kinds of happy. I reviewed colours and we played the “Find something (insert colour)” game where they all had to go round to find something in the class, that colour. Their eyes found the colours in all the places I could never have imagined!

Find something brown...

Some of the kids ran to grab and hug me tightly. It was such a sweet emotional moment for me.

Find something red...

Rinku held his breath till he turned red   

Find something white...

Rinku pointed at his teeth.

Find something yellow...

Rinku touched his teeth again 

And my darling Takeru was the smartest of them all. While every other kid ran around frantically looking for an object in the right colour, he simply found a pack of coloured pencils and put them in front of him, bringing out the right colours one after the other like a boss.

We ended the class with the “Heads, shoulders, knees and toes” song and I made a beautiful discovery that Yuta loves songs, he never speaks and it was exciting to see him try the action as he did his best to move to the song.

For beautiful experiences like this, I would choose to be a teacher over and over again. 

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post!

Image Credit: https://theinclusivechurch.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/4-color-puzzle-piece- special-needs.png  accessed via google images