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My name is Sharon Weickhardt and I taught the Everyone Everyday program um to my classes
of three four students last year. Um ...The program aims to teach about inclusivity and
understanding about disability and um and looking at disability in a positive light.
There are quite a few benefits in the Everyone Everyday program. Um one was that it gave
the children um a much deeper understanding and awareness of disability. Um disability
that we have in our school as well as um at at home and in their general community. Um
another one was that the, it developed, they had a common language so we already have um
teach social skills programme we have our school values that fit beautifully with that
um and it helped to deepen um the language that we have um and gave the children confidence
to talk clearly and and specifically about issues that might arise or just general conversation
that we are having. I think the Everyone Everyday program program
helped to remove some of the stigma around disability. Um I remember one particular lesson
we were would the children were making lots of connections, sorry, a little girl talked
about um disability um at home and then somebody else talked about another family member or
you know, um further down, a friend of a friend um and there were other students that started
talking about their own disabilities or and they would put their hand up an identify themselves
with that and they were proud. It was, it was never something to be ashamed of. They
all talked confidently and they were proud to know people because um they connected they
had a connection to someone with a disability who was um had strategies and had ways of
getting through life in a positive way um and so there were always positive talks around
it around that. I think so particularly in our classroom last
year there were times we needed to do things like change our physical environment or um
come up with some strategies from the program to, on ways we could include children and
that then had the opportunity to go and practice that um whether it was within lessons or out
on the playground within the normal school environment.
Yes I think their awareness and understanding help the children to um be more considerate
when they have issues in the playground um it also gave us the language to talk about,
to talk about things in a way they understand. Yes the feedback that we got was very positive
um and and as I said they had a deeper understanding and particularly in our school as we have
quite a range of special needs sometimes particularly new parents come and they are not really sure
how to take maybe our assembly or um new friends that their children have and this gives the
children the language to talk about it at home.
I’d love to see that in our school um because the children I had this year um were half
of them were involved in that program last year and they talk a lot about it still and
it stayed with them um and in our school in particular it relates very well to our social
skills program our school values so its constantly being discussed and mentioned with understanding
and I think if we can use that and combine that with what we already have from the beginning
from kindergarten and carry that all the way through I think that would be very powerful.
Obviously things like that with our school values program would work very well at the
beginning of the year um and it just it sets the it helps to set the culture for the school
right from the beginning so I think if we were doing it as a whole school it would be
particularly good to do it then but um I don’t see any problem doing it at any other time
of the year though. Yes I think it’s very flexible. The content
in there its it’s so valuable um and there’s so much to it you can um make modifications
and not lose not lose the value of it I think. Having a quality program there with everything,
and all the resources and everything, um very, you know um, it saves a lot of time. It um.
I felt very comforted by that. Um the pressure of getting through things that’s a problem
with everything we have all the time but having everything there, having it linked to the
curriculum um being able to integrate it into all different subject areas made it very easy
to use um and I felt quite I felt very comfortable working with it.
Yes I would, I have, and I’d like, I think it would be something great for our school
to continue with as I said it just works well with what we already do - it goes a little
bit deeper.