“So we plan weekly what we are going to do for the following week, we talk about all the children and all their needs. It’s very good, we just kinda brainstorm. You know, we see a child and ‘What can we do to help this child this week?’ So that’s what I do, I work with children indivdiually and they also work with children individually. But we do our activities together all day long so the children are all together in one classroom and it’s very nice. Depending on a child and depending on their needs…but many times we will have a table of children who are functioning at maybe a two-year level all grouped together. You know, they might be Head Start, they might be Early Childhood, but we work at the developmental level. So if their snipping is the level the others are at, they sit and snip together. But we’re not pulling all the Early Childhood into one area and the Head Start in the other, we’re mixing ages.”

Head Start was in collaboration with the day care and that’s where I got my first year of working with Head Start. Then I was asked if I would be interested in transferring to the Blair/Taylor collaborative that was just beginning.

It works wonderfully. The kids don’t see that they have differences. They accept each other and they don’t notice anything. They don’t notice if there’s someone who’s not able to walk yet. We’ve had some children in the past that learned to walk. They come in from birth to three and they don’t walk around the classroom as well, and they help them. They’re like bigger brothers and sisters. When they sit at the table and work, you see all different levels of (kids) being able to write, to color, to cut, and they accept each other. They (the younger ones) watch the other children who are doing this and they just naturally try, they work together. They do help each other a lot. That works out really nice.”