Monday, March 30, 2015

Mr. Potato Head's Follow Direction Activity

I'm always looking for activities that provide student's fun ways to learn how to follow one and two step directions.  This Mr. Potato Head's Activity is a great and fun way to help the students.  I printed them in color using cardstock paper for durability, and then laminated them.  Once they were laminated, I cut them out, and put magnets on the back of them.  Something different besides a file folder or velcro.  I picked up cheap cookie sheets in order to complete the activity.  I will tell you there are a lot of pieces.  It's nice, because there are two potato heads and you could play with two people and give each person a card or you can play with one person and they work on both potato heads.

The different directions

Here are the different parts.  As you can tell, there are pieces to make a girl and boy potato head.

Happy learning!!!
Shannon


Thursday, March 26, 2015

Positional Words


I'm always looking for different activities for my younger students.  We have a wide range of disabilities in our classroom.  I have found when I give directions to my student's they don't always understand what it means to put the object under the table, or beside it, etc. I found this positional words book on teacherspayteachers and my little boy with down syndrome loves it!!!  It's really nice, because the first few pages are not as long so you can see all the objects that they are requesting you to place on each page.  You do take them off as you go, because you use them on different pages. The speech teacher always comes and borrow's the book too.


Front of the book.  You can kind of tell how the pages on the left are shorter then the back page.

An example of what the book looks like inside.

This is the last page.  It is a full page that includes the velcro pieces.


Happy learning!!!!
Shannon



Monday, March 23, 2015

Four in a Row Addition and Subtraction

My son love's to play games at home and believe it or not he likes to play educational games.  I think it's more, because he think's it's the coolest when he can beat his mom!!!  This game is a spin off to me of connect four, except with a different name and concept.  Of course...you can guess that I got it off of teacherspayteachers!

How this game is played, is you have once dice and two different markers.  We just used pennies and nickels to cover our spaces.  You have to roll the dice, and then whatever number is on that dice you find a problem in that row and solve it.  Once you solve it you cover that space.  The object of the game is to get four in a row along either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal with making sure you block your opponent too!

Here are some pictures of my son and I playing.


There are different levels with the addition and subtraction boards.  





I wish the picture of him winning wouldn't have turned out blurry!  It was so cute how excited he was to beat me!  Believe me, I don't try to lose either!  He get's being competitive from his mom!!


Happy Learning!!!
Shannon

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Update on Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Hello!!!!!!!!!!

Awhile back I posted about a new theme that I was working on in my classroom.  If you are new to my blog, here is the link: Nursery Rhyme Unit 

Anyways, we have finally filled the tree with some letters, and now it's time for them to fall down the tree.  I wanted to show you how it looked now.  Remember, every nursery rhyme is based off a letter of the alphabet.  The kids really seem to work on the activities and then complete the art project at the end of the week.


Happy Learning!!!

Shannon

Friday, March 20, 2015

My Joy!!!!!

We all have our moments in our classroom that are just a big joy or put a smile on our face. Everyone one of my student's in my classroom are near and dear to my heart.  I was having one of those day's that nothing and I mean nothing was going my way.  This little boy is the sweetest little boy and I had every power to try and not smile when he was teasing his paraprofessional with a bean bag chair not to laugh.  So, I decided to take pictures.  Everyday, when it's rough and you just don't know what to do, I'm going to come back and look at him. Take a look....


He didn't want to give up the bubble wrap, so he decided to slide the bean bag chair away from us and continued to pop it.

His grin made me laugh the whole time.  Eventually, we had to pull him back into the classroom as he giggled the whole time.



Ok...so back to my post about movement....in a previous post I talked about how movement in your classroom is a good thing and it get's your students up and moving.  Well, once again this little boy decided he was going to play drums with me.  I finally was able to get him video taped on the ipad. Normally, he can be a stinker and stop what he's doing if you are watching him.  GUESS WHAT!!!  I got him!!  LOL

So, everyday he knows what time we get up and do movement activities and he uses two markers for his drums, and everyday the kids hand him his markers and he is ready to go.



Thursday, March 19, 2015

Candy Land: Parts of Speech

Hey everyone!!!!

I hope this finds you with a smile on your face and like our school we are in fourth quarter already.  I talked about Jen Stamm and her AWESOME material's she has over at teacherspayteachers. If you haven't checked her out...you really should.  She has even made things for me.  Well...I popped over to her page again one day and found out she made...drum roll please...CANDY LAND GAMES!!!!!  That was my all time favorite game to play when I was little.  So, of course I bought all of them.  I even asked her if she could do an alphabet one for my students who are in preschool and kindergarten.  As soon as I finish printing them out and getting the materials together I will continue to post more.  Here is one of them I have completed with my students.

With this...I divided the student's up into groups and made sure that the different learning ability levels were mixed in.  

They had to work as a team to come up with the answer, instead of just one person providing the answer all the time.



Cards are just like the original candy land cards, except they have words on them.



Just bought an Candy Land game from Walmart for $5.  Now days they don't have ones with the cards.  They just have a spinner, board, and the pieces in it.



Well...I highly recommend her.  I cannot speak enough about her work.  


Happy Learning!!!
Shannon

Friday, March 6, 2015

Scavenger Hunts

Hello!!!!

I am a big time crafter when it comes to making things, cards and scrapbooking, but due to being so busy with work, I have to rely on my favorite website.  teacherspayteachers When I'm on that website, I don't always find what I am looking for, but you can put out a request of what you want and see if another person has something similar or you can work out a deal and they make it for you.  I have been working with an awesome lady that has been making my scavenger hunts.  Her name is Jen Stamm.  It started out with...ummm...I guess I really don't know anymore, because she has made so many awesome scavenger hunts for me that I own then all and continue to buy as she makes more. She is now making candy land games and we played one yesterday for the first time and the kids just loved that!  I will post that in another post.  If I were you and what learning games and fun games to head over to her page.  Here is the link Jen Stamm  

This is how I do it in my classroom, on Thursday's I set up the scavenger hunts and determine which ones the students will do.  Some of the scavenger hunts are harder then others, do I pick which ones will work with the different students.  I did make an excel sheet, so I do know what student has already done that scavenger hunt.  Below are some pictures to see some of the action.  Did I mention how much my student's love these?  They are always begging to do it more then just once a week.








I set it up right away in the morning and it just so happened that one of the student's was absent.  HEHE so I got the other special education teacher hunting for the cards.  :-)


Happy Learning!

Shannon

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Movement

I've always known that you need to get student's up and moving around to get the energy flowing back and recess is not always coming fast enough for it to happen.  I recently went to a workshop that is called SMART and they really focus on movement, the brain and activities that incorporate learning along with learning.  They had us up and moving and normally I'm one of those teachers that are like ya right you aren't getting me to do this, but it was so much fun that when I came back I ordered the different CD's that I loved.  The one advice the presenter's said was make sure to practice before you have your students do it.  Well, knowing my special education student's I wanted to learn right along with them and let them know it's okay to make mistakes.  We sure had fun learning together.  Then they got the bright idea to do the Cha Cha slide too and honestly I didn't care as long as they were getting up and moving around before we switched to another area of learning.  Here are some video's to show you what we are doing.  I do still have some student's that are quite shy about doing it.  I also showed the other special education teacher in my room that was helping.  Hope you enjoy!





Happy Learning!!

Shannon