Spring has Sprung!

We have been working on the 4 seasons, weather and recently, spring and plants. Here are some of the things we have been working on! I apologize that some of the pictures are sideways :-/

We did a unit on the four seasons, identifying the months in those seasons and the weather conditions and range of temperatures we see at those times. I made this felt board tree that we manipulated with during our conversations and books about weather/seasons.

Summer Tree

Fall Tree

Winter Tree

Spring Tree

Here is just something I made for outside of my classroom so people knew where we were. I used velcro to attach the specials and its dry erase to change the times.

We did a Very Hungry Caterpillar Unit which is always fun. So much counting, identifying days of the week, identifying fruits, colors, butterfly life cycle, etc. On Friday we made a Very Hungry Caterpillar fruit salad, tried all the fruits the caterpillar did in the story, then mixed them all up to a fruit salad. We were almost late for the bus it was so delicious! A big thank you to my amazing speech pathologist who let me use a lot of these resources! We used those little fruit popsicle sticks as our "recipe" for fruit salad. I had them all in a basket and each student got to take turns pulling them out and reading me the recipe: how many and what fruit?

Currently, we are doing some plant experiments, learning about the plant life cycle and watching growth. Our current experiment is what do plants need to grow? We are tracking the growth of four different beans: one with sun and water, one with only sun, one with only water, and one with neither. Which one will grow? We are going to chart on our graph once they start sprouting.

Here is a cute printable that I laminated. I will use this during our counting stations on Thursday afternoons!

We are making grass heads and identifying parts of our bodies. Plants are living just like us! Once the grass grows, it will look like hair. A cute, but sometimes confusing analogy ;-)

Back to seasons, I made this sort with a common icon. First we colored all the icons the corresponding color, then added them onto our colored mat to see which months were in which season. It was a really cool way for the kids to understand the topic.

We made season wheels from plates. I loved these black plates for high contrast. We had a ton of leftovers from a City BBQ party. This also linked in with our felt board tree at the beginning of the post.

We did a bit about kites while talking about weather-wind. There is a 5 Little Kites felt board story that I made characters to. We did experiments: Will the wind blow it? and used a fan to blow different classroom objects and observed if the wind was able to blow it or not. Here was a fun math game that we played. As you can see, each one is differentiated. We used the dice that you can see in my previous post from January-March. Students had to roll their dice then find that number on their kite, color it in. The first person with all their kite colored won the game.

We read a story about a bunny and talked about the main character. Then we made him with paper plates, cotton balls (fine motor-we pulled them all apart and we threaded the pipe cleaners through the back of the plate), added eyes, nose and ears.

We focused on eggs, spring and bunnies and not Easter for obvious reasons. So we wrote a class poem called Wake Up, Spring and each line was Wake up, ________. They had to choose an egg and open it, identify what was inside and help me try to spell it using our knowledge of letter sounds. I had different objects in the eggs, ones that we have talked about in recent units and CVC words that we know (pig, dog), etc. Then we read our poem and made our own spring wreathes, see below:

I used paint chips from Home Depot to cut out pastel eggs and they got to choose some, glue them onto this spring paper plate that I cut the middle out of, and glued on pastel marshmallows on after counting them out.

January-March (but February got lost!)

Here are some of the things I have been doing the end of winter and beginning of Spring. I am not sure why I didn't document much in February. Must have been a busy, short month!!

January:
We worked on the snow theme and made some cute snow globes with marble paint (put the foam snowman cut out onto these cute snowglobes I made out of construction paper, put them in a box lid, and put marbles dunked in white paint in and shook to make it snow!)

We also read a story that was hand made by a speech pathologist I met and it was a sequence of making a snowman and adding the things he had on him. Students sequenced the story using different cut outs, we also did shaving cream and glue snowmen as a sensory activity:

Dr. Seuss:

I did a lot of the common themes, Cat in the Hat, Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Green Eggs and Ham, Fox in Socks, The Foot Book, etc

For the Cat in the Hat, they made their own hats following the AB pattern, white/red, etc. We identified characters and events, etc. For The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, I made an alphabetical order activity that is just like the book:

We also did the Foot Book, measured our feet by tracing them and counting out Unifix Cubes:

We did Green Eggs and Ham-we are working on shaking head up and down for yes and side to side for no, we also made green eggs and ham using vanilla pudding, green food coloring and a vanilla wafer in the middle as the "yolk". Here is a switch we used while reading the story:

We also did One Fish, Two Fish, and sorted out colored gold fish. We made some counting flip books using Dr. Seuss stickers.

St. Patrick's Day/March:

Sorry these are sideways and/or upside down:

Here is a game called the Shamrock game that focuses on simple counting 1-10. We put the large dice in a big bin and shake it, then stop, because students had a hard time rolling the dice. They have a marker of some type (we use little counting bears as their markers) and they move the amount they rolled, so they are counting 1:1 and then counting up to a number and stopping. If they land on a Shamrock, they get a Shamrock card. As soon as all the cards are gone, the game is over (makes it easy for you to control the end of the game). Whoever has the most Shamrock cards wins.

I printed this cute scavenger hunt off online and the kids love it. They are looking around their environment, looking for color identification, remembering a sequence (rainbow order), and at the end the leprechaun left us a surprise (it was pistachio pudding, add water and this magical white powder turns green before your eyes! How magical..we did not eat it we just watched it change and then I tossed it).

Pots of Rainbows! I used those same foam popsicle sticks and students had to count out 6 sticks, one of each color, then remember the order and what ROY G. BIV stands for. They had a lot of fun!

IEP Work Time and Work Bags

It has been a long time! I am going to do a few posts because I have been taking pictures since January but have not posted them. I am going to start off with some updates on how I do my IEP work time this year.

Each morning, I set aside individual time to work on IEP objectives. Usually in the morning we have various therapy pull-outs, so it works out nicely that some students are in therapy while a couple are in the classroom as well. Since writing my IEP's, I made sure that I could write a really good data sheet for the objective before I wrote the objective. This did simplify the writing of objectives! I made sure I based them off the extended common core standards, the ones that I thought were most essential for each individual.

Once I had all my students IEP's written and data sheets made, I tried to set up a schedule to make sure that each week, I am taking data on every academic and behavioral objective on every student's IEP. This was not such a small task. A bit easier because I have 4 students, but still difficult because of pull-outs and also I have a student who does inclusion for 1/2 day. So, on Mondays I focus on reading objectives, on Tuesdays I focus on Math, on Wednesdays I do a "make-up" day for anything missed and/or DIBELS, on Thursdays I do behavioral goals and try to get my one student that does inclusion on all his goals, and Friday I do DIBELS and anything I didn't get to throughout the week and we also do our handwriting goals on Friday first thing in the morning.

I am working with the student on different tasks that I can take data on the IEP objective on so the big question...what are the other students doing??? This is always a challenging task as every special educator knows you have to be flexible. Students are going to be absent. Therapy pull-outs won't always be regular (they have so much to do and I truly think my therapists are amazing).

So, first, with the students I try (and I am still not there yet) to set up boundaries at the beginning of the year and keep them consistent throughout the year. If you are working or earning on the carpet or at the table, you stay with that activity until you are told to transition or unless you clean up, raise your hand, and ask for something different. So, some students are able to participate in an individual task in one of these areas while I take data on another student. My instructional assistant is awesome and we have one student on a routine with her because he responds well to that, where she works on the same thing every morning with him while I take data on another student, then we switch.

The SMARTboard has been a great resource in my room because students can work on that independently (simple cause and effect reward games, starfall, etc). And finally, work bags.

I have created these bags and they do wonders when trying to occupy a student (my instructional assistant can do them easily), they work when you have a substitute teacher in the room, they work with simple tasks if you have a student observer/teacher that wants to try a task with a student. They focus on academic as well as fine motor skills. It helps the students make choices of what they want to work on. They are simple, easily contained and hands-on. These work wonders while I am taking data on a student and need the other students to be engaged.

Here are some pictures!

This is pretty self explanatory but...cookie sheets are $1.00 at the Dollar Tree, and perfect size for these double gallon (I think) Hefty bags (purchased at Target).

Here are a couple of them sitting out, as you can see, cookie sheet fits in great.

This was the most time consuming one. I printed these off a website in color, laminated every letter, attached a magnet to every pom-pom in every color, and in this work bin there is also a cookie sheet so the poms stick when the child is working.

This one is a hit...little bath mats with mini suction cups hold the marbles perfectly. I colored in the dots black so they can see it better. We also work on counting the marbles as we put them on or take them off. Sometimes you get marbles all over the floor so be careful walking into Room 5 ;-)

This was a fun one, shapes, using foam colored popsicle sticks and velcro with foam cut outs in the middle.

These are just some examples, I also have a lacing one with lacing cards and beads, one with unifix cube pattern cards I printed out and unifix cubes, and one with clothespins and paper plates that you put the clothespin with the corresponding cue on the paper plate such as colors and numbers. I plan on creating a few more, vocab and picture match, a pringles can that I cut little holes in and your put pipe cleaners into the holes, and a sorting one. A lot of ideas you can find under "toddler bags" or "busy bags" on Pinterest.