Science Preview: 5 Senses

Last week, one of my older students told me "In April, we have 5 Senses in Science."  I love that my kids remember  the order of our Science Units and look forward to them from month to month and year to year!  The favorite thing for my students this coming month is our Jelly Bean Taste Testing Experiment!  Check out the unit on TPT here.

Beginning WH Questions

With some of my lower verbal students, we have just begun working more directly on differentiating between WH questions.  All year, I have been searching for the perfect photo cards to use when teaching WH questions.  I have several different sets of pictures, but nothing that felt comprehensive enough or that had enough variety.

11 Products I Can't Live Without!

As teachers, we all have certain items we can't live without in our classrooms.  Today, I want to share some of my favorite items with you.  I'm sure many of these items are on your lists as well!  These are listed in no particular order.

Cute Chevron Border on image is from http://frompond.blogspot.com

Rainbow Craftivity with Fruit Loops

Since this month's science topic is "Weather" and one of our vocabulary words is "rainbow," I decided to have my kids use their matching/sorting skills to create a Fruit Loop Rainbow.

Simple 2-Part Following Direction Activity

At the beginning of this school year, about 1/2 my class didn't know their alphabet!  Now, some of these students have it down solid, but all have made significant progress!  So exciting!!  

The other day during one of my large group stations, I was all alone (my co-teacher was in a meeting) with a difficult group of 7 students.  I was struggling to think of an activity I could do by myself…but then came up with having the kids follow 2-part directions.  

I drew a basic table on each piece of paper and handed them out.  I told the kids "Write a Red A" or a "Yellow W."  =  They did GREAT!!  Many of these students have lower receptive language skills, so this was a great activity to have the kids work on following auditory directions.  I was also super impressed, because there is no way at the beginning of the year, this group of students would have had the knowledge or behavioral skills to complete this activity.  I love seeing how much my kids have changed by this point in the school year!  

Assistive Tech Activtiy

I have 2 students who were assessed to get Assistive Technology Communication Devices this year.  In my school district, if the assessors are not sure of the best device for a kid, they do a month long trial.  We create goals for the kids, take data, and monitor their progress.  If they are successful, they then get access to the device.  If they are not successful, they re-evaluate and try a different device.  Earlier this year, we did a month long trial with the Nova-Chat with one kiddo which was super successful, and this month we are doing a trial of the Accent.  

The student using this device is extremely rigid…so at first, he wanted nothing to do with the device.  After one day of using it in morning group, his rigidity starting paying off because now, he will not complete morning group without it!

He is able to greet a peer, find the month, day, weather, etc. on the device!  Most of these are 1-word utterances currently.  So, to start expanding the length of his utterances, I wanted to find a repetitive activity with lots of opportunities to practice.  While looking through my materials, I found these fun spinners from target.  The kid chooses a color and a shape, and draws it on his paper.  

Advanced Morning Group Re-Vamped!

With the loss of one student, and the addition of a new student last week, I decided it was time to re-vamp and re-structure our morning group for my more advanced students.  

I posted our new AM Group schedule on the board.