Personal Narrative: My Experience At Camp Accomplishment

The summer after my senior year of high school, I volunteered at Camp Accomplishment, a summer camp for children with special needs. By this point, I had decided that I wanted to be a preschool special education teacher. I realized that this was the perfect opportunity for me to gain experience in the special education field.

On my first day, I arrived an hour after camp had opened, as I had been instructed. I was informed that the children played in separate rooms until everyone arrived for the day, and that I could choose which room I wanted to sit in on. The more active children played in the gross motor room, and the calmer children played in another room. As I had, as of yet, no experience, in the special education field, I determined that …show more content…
I was still nervous about working with him, but I had asked my mother, who had worked in a daycare most of my life, for ideas for working with him the night before. I started off by making a game out of cleaning up the balls he had dumped all over the room. It was a competition to see who could put the balls away the fastest, which I made educational by asking him the colors of the balls as we threw them back into the container. I was shocked when he got almost all of the colors right, only making mistakes when balls were darker or lighter shades of certain colors. Later on that day, I was informed by the camp director that Isaac could already read quite well, despite having only recently turned three. This caused me to question my opinion of Isaac.

It was another week before I was grouped with Isaac again. That day, I learned that his reading ability was considered a savant ability, as he had never been taught, and was already reading at an elementary school level. I was greatly impressed by this, as I had only ever met one other savant, my best friend, who I have known my entire life, and who is an incredibly gifted musician, able to play multiple instruments by