Harford County Public Schools' Learning Together Program

May 31—Amanda Scearce starts every work day a little before 8 a.m. at Havre de Grace Elementary School with a cup of coffee in her hand and a goal for her students.

Scearce started her career as a special education teacher in 2010 after three years of being a paraprofessional at the elementary school. It is no surprise that she came back to teach at Havre de Grace when the Early Intervention Learning Together program came to the school after it was implemented in 2016.

"All I ever wanted to do was to be a teacher," Scearce said. "I have wanted to be a teacher since I met my kindergarten teacher at Jarrettsville Elementary. I absolutely love it."

The Harford County Public Schools' Early Intervention Program Learning Together program lets 3- and 4-year-old children with learning disabilities or developmental delays participate in a free, two- or three-half-day preschool. The program promotes social, communication, literacy and numeracy skill development for all children.

The Learning Together program is offered at Meadowvale, Havre de Grace, Edgewood , Homestead-Wakefield, Youth's Benefit and North Bend elementary schools.

The Maryland State Department of Education has an approved early childhood curriculum called the Creative Curriculum that is taught by an early childhood special education teacher and supported by two paraprofessionals.

The Creative Curriculum enables early childhood students to apply skills and addresses four areas of development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive and language. The curriculum is teacher-led, with small and large group activities, and provides teachers with details on child development, classroom organization, teaching strategies, and engaging families in the learning process. Online record-keeping tools assist teachers with the maintenance and organization of student portfolios, individualized planning and report production.

"We kind of pick and choose from the different ideas that they give you for each study," Scearce said. "They might have a song that will go along with what they are learning, or a book; a lot of them start off with a fairy tale. We may have different activities like a letter game we may play."

Students who are evaluated prior to attending the program receive an Individualized Education Plan, and transportation based on how close they live to the location of schools with the program. Students without Individualized Education Plans do not receive transportation. Parents of both sets of students receive progress reports and graphs about their child's skills and behaviors.

There are two different classes each day. One class is from 9:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., and another from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. The daily schedule is circle time, whole group, center time, story time, snack time, letter time, recess and dismissal.

For reading time, Scearce reads out of a big book filled with Individualized Education Plan goals, and for story time the students participate in echo reading, in which a speech pathologist will read a line of text and the students "echo" it back in the same manner. Scearce places students in one of the three rotational centers based on current behavior and skill. Each center has one adult.

"That way there's always one or two peers that can model more skills to the other kiddos in the group," Scearce said.

In her classroom, Scearce writes a focus question on the board. For a week or two, students learn everything about the subject of the question. If they are still interested in the question, it may stay on the board for an additional week.

In addition to the Creative Curriculum, the Learning Together program, along with all pre-K and kindergarten students learn the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum, a curriculum that provides up to 35 weeks of daily lessons, focusing on eight phonemic awareness skills, along with two additional activities to develop letter and sound recognition, and language awareness.

"This is a new curriculum for us," Scearce said. "We focus on rhyme recognition and give them actions to do to go along with blending and segmenting words. The county started this last year, and it's been phenomenal."

"It's a good progression of starting the curriculum before [Learning Together program students] continue on to pre-K or Kindergarten," said Robyn Graham, a special education teacher specialist for birth to five.

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Prior to Haggerty, the county did not have a phonemic awareness curriculum that had set lessons and times for instruction. The program, however, has always added little lessons in rhyme recognition every other day as well as blending and segmenting words from the Creative Curriculum, Scearce said.

All the lessons in both the Creative Curriculum and Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum have detailed short lessons. Heggerty's lessons are up to 12 minutes long.

"If you don't move quickly, you lose their attention," Scearce said. "Some of our kids will start to focus on something else, so you have to bring them back. To keep them engaged, we move quickly through things. Our kids are preparing to go to pre-K or preparing for kindergarten. They need structure and I rarely deviate from routine. I think the most successful thing we can do for them to go to kindergarten is enabling them to follow directions and be independent.

"If they can go into kindergarten, put their stuff in their cubby, travel to a destination that we need them to go, and go to the carpet to follow directions, then they are already going to be successful when they get there because they are going to be slammed with curriculum all day long. That day will come, but right now they need to be able to do the little things."

Kristen Starcher's 4-year-old daughter, Norah, has attended the Learning Together Program at Havre De Grace Elementary School for a year. Starcher is passionate about the program. She works for Best Buddies, an international nonprofit that aims to create opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

"When I heard about the program, I was so excited to be a part of it," Starcher said. "Inclusion is so important. Not only has my daughter learned everything she needs to learn to prepare for kindergarten, but she also learned about empathy, patience and kindness. She's learning about differences and how we should embrace our differences. At such a young age for her to be learning these things, it's something I never imagined. I couldn't have asked for more. For my child to experience learning how to be a kind human."