Neurodiversity Celebration Week

    2nd grade just completed their Service Learning Project for the year, and it might be our favorite one yet! Each grade level at Goodrich completes a Service Learning Project, which is a project that is hands-on and connects community needs to classroom learning. This year, our project is about celebrating and educating others about neurodiversity. 

    For a few weeks now, 2nd grade has been learning all about what neurodiversity is, and how we can help others understand it. The main phrase we’ve been working on is, “all brains are different!” We've watched videos, done research, read books, and talked to teacher experts about how we can help. We've learned that everyone has unique strengths, and everyone has different ways that their brain works. This might mean that some people have different needs than us, and that's ok!

    After we finished reseraching and learning for ourselves, it was time for us to come up with a project. Students came up with a lot of different ideas, and we were able to incorporate many of them! We discovered that a worldwide initiative called Neurodiversity Celebration Week was coming up in March, and this would tie in perfectly. Our goal was to promote acceptance and appreciation for students that are neurodiverse. After hearing all of the ideas, we created committees so each 2nd grader had a project to work on. We had a video group, book group, sensory group, announcements group, posters group, and finally, mural group. Each group had very specific tasks to help our celebration week come to life. 

    The whole school watched our introduction video, many books featuring neurodiverse characters were checked out from the library, our posters were hung throughout the school for all to see, eight brave students made morning announcements, students convinced Dr. Scaletta to purchase sensory tools for each classroom, everyone wore rainbow colors on Friday to celebrate, and finally, every student in the school made a handprint and our mural group helped hang them up in a beautiful display. Our project made a lasting impact on students and staff at school. We are SO proud!