Kohl McCormick Early Childhood Teaching Awards
Jeanne Bolt
Special Education Teacher
Low Incidence Cooperative Agreement
Des Plaines
Jeanne Bolt's philosophy is to approach teaching from the eyes of a child -- a style which works well with her special needs students. Because all of her infant to three-year-old students have some degree of hearing loss, she uses a highly individualized program of learning to help each child communicate -- which helps strengthen their overall development. Her particular brand of teaching "magic" lies in her flexibility: working with children not only at the Low Incidence Cooperative Center in Des Plaines, where she teaches, but also working with children and their families at home or at other day care sites. She tailors her teaching to each child's level of need: If a child is too active to sit and complete a puzzle, Bolt encourages the child to take a puzzle piece and run with it; take it up and down the slide; and then walk back with it, and try to put it into place.
When two of her children's families spoke Spanish only, she enrolled in a Spanish class at a nearby college, practiced with the parents, and sought additional help. One of the things Bolt emphasizes in teaching is encouraging families to read to their children. This practice, she says, helps children develop language skills and understand story concepts -- and it works especially well with children who have a hearing loss. To make the challenge of reading more fun for her students, last year she received a grant to work with each family to create their own books -- which included individualized story lines, pictures of the child and family engaged in a series of activities, and captions. She laminated each book, to make them durable and portable enough for the child to take everywhere. The books served multiple learning purposes: they not only were a fun activity for families to do together, they helped parents to work with their child's developmental needs, and ultimately helped the children to read. This year, she plans to expand the idea by creating special books to help three year olds make the transition from her program to public school or other community programs. "Gifted and conscientious," are words her colleagues use to describe Bolt. More humbly, she describes her "play-based" teaching approach as focusing on a child's strengths, then imaginatively finding a way to "stretch" him or her to meet their areas of need.