It has been quite a while since my last post, but I have had a student teacher this semester and since I haven't been teaching, I haven't been documenting :-)
I do want to catch up before I begin teaching again and I will be posting more often (hopefully!). Todays post I want to go over a couple of activity ideas for hands-on learning because this year I have a lot of students that require hands on manipulatives to stay engaged on on task.
I will begin with something fun that I made that was under $20.00 and I made 3 of them! I made tactile sensory matching cards for students with low vision or that are hands-on learners. We have been brainstorming a lot this year to find appropriate activities for our students.
Here's what they look like. I bought small black cardstock and laminated it, then I purchased different textured paper and cut and hot glued in onto the cardstock. These ones feel like alligator, shiny, basketball, cork board...
And these ones are glitter, burlap, dots, leopard fuzzy and crimped. The last two have matching counterparts but for the sake of not having to take another picture I just put them together.
These will make a great activity for using hands purposefully, working with objects for a purpose, matching skills, visual and tactile learning, etc.
We also made these visual schedules for outside our classrooms. We are working a lot with our grade level teams in our PLCs (we call them TBTs) so we have different kiddos going different places all day. We keep this outside the door so that therapists, nurses, childcare attendants, etc. know where the kids are.
We made them for our rooms, kindergarten and pre-kindergarten. The cookie sheets were from the dollar tree. So cheap!
So, I can post pictures of some of these things later, but some activities we have been doing at our center time for hands on learning:
Reading: Tactile ABC pages, we made igloos out of cotton balls for I, we made newspaper collages for N, we are sticking flat lollipops on the page for L, we made a fuzzy cat for C, etc. We are trying to incorporate the common core standards extended with activities that are appropriate for our student's levels.
Handwriting without tears, building with the wooden pieces, making marks on the smartboard
Using smartexchange, my student teacher has been trying to make reading cause/effect items with visuals and sounds for the letter of the week.
Letter tubs: We have printed the items that are in the letter tub into a communication device so students can practice using communication devices to request preferred items.
For each letter of the week, we have two items to play with and have been using two switches to program those items so they begin to learn that hitting the switch has a purpose and a consequence for which toy you get to play with.
We have been working on requesting "more" and "all done" or "yes" and "no" when listening to letter of the week songs or videos on the smartboard.
For "Words Their Way" we have been doing a sort at one of our stations, usually a color sort, or a bumpy/smooth sort, or a pasta sort to begin sorting skills.
We have a word of the week that we practice saying with the switch and usually do a group writing about. For example, the word of the week is want, so we make a giant sentence strip and kids help put on "I want" then they can pick a picture or item to write about.
Math: We have a "color of the week" and we are almost done with that but we would do various color activities like using those colors on the lightbox, sorting the color and "not that color"
Simple switch games, like we have a spinner that is switch activated to numbers 1-4 then we would practice counting 1-4 and feeding a toy dog that many biscuits or building a tower that high and having a switch toy knock it down.
We have a counting jar so students can work on putting things into a container and taking things out, getting one thing at a time off the table.
There is an interactive numeracy board where the students can put objects onto velcro to count out that number, they can make marks to tally the number, they practice giving the teacher a "high-three, or high-two (similar to high-five but with those fingers)", they practice putting the dots in a ten frame.
We have a big book for both math and reading where they can differentiate the letter or number of the week in different fonts and pull it off and put it on our letter/number of the week strip.
Pictures to come!
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