The IWB is down!

Our IWB is currently suffering from a malfunctioning power pack, so unfortunately the interactivity is not working. Right now the board is functioning only as a projector. We are eagerly awaiting the delivery of a new power pack so that we can get back to work with the board and hopefully come up with some great ideas to share.

Play Based Learning Goals

In our class, we focus on specific play skills so that our students will have successful play interactions with their peers and those they may play with during integration opportunities. In order to keep track of what we are working on we created the following chart. The first box of the chart shows what specific play activities we are targeting. The second box indicates what specific language we are targeting at each area. The third box is the targeted play for our water/sand/sensory table. Our special education team has been really supporting this effort by creating picture symbols for the targeted vocabulary.

The year at a glance

October goals

Storage

Storage always seems to be at a premium in our classroom, even though we have tons of cupboards we always have too much stuff! We wanted our therapy ball to be easily accessible by staff and out of reach for the students when not in use. Since there is no way it fits in a cupboard, I used wool to arm knit a hammock for it, and so far it is working out really well. I got the idea from the BEAP program staff at Birchmount Collegiate who use old volleyball nets to store their therapy balls.

Requesting Art Supplies

This picture symbol requesting station is attached to the cupboard where the art supplies are held. Students can request using the individual picture or by creating a simple I want sentence.

Organizing Our Sensory Cupboard

Last year our sensory cupboard looked like it had exploded. We spent lots of time searching for chewies and spinners. This year our sensory cupboard is all organized. Hopefully this will help us stay organized this year. The only thing left to create and get organized is our "smell" bin with different extracts on cotton balls in little jars.

Tactile Book

Every year one of the favourite books in our class is Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? For this years class I made a tactile version of the book by adding fabric to each of the animal pages. Special thanks to my local upholstery store for all the fabric scraps. I am looking forward to seeing how the students react to the book and to making more.

Free Visual Timers from the App Store

Our entire school uses visual timers to help support students of all abilities anticipate, recognize and manage transitions. The large visual timers are not convenient to carry with us to the outdoor learning yard, park or on community walks.

The App Store for Apple users has a couple of good free timers:

Children's Countdown - Visual Countdown Timer, is programmable to as little as 10 seconds, has a child mode which hides the buttons when the timer is running. It also reveals an image as the timer is counting down

VisTimerFree - counts down from 1-10 minutes and is a simple orange visual countdown

Paintbrushes and Grip

Lately we have noticed that our students tend to hold paintbrushes by the end. This causes them to have limited control of the paintbrush. Last weekend I took home a bunch of our paintbrushes and cut them down. The students are now forced to hold the paintbrush closer to the brush head, increasing their control. The paintbrushes are easy to cut down using a handsaw and cut ends should be sanded to eliminate the possibility of splinters.

Exploring Symmetry

Our students have been enjoying building different pictures out of pattern blocks. We decided to introduce some of them to the idea of symmetry. We created several different flipchart pages that had different pictures made with yellow, red, and blue squares. We then used "drag a copy" to allow the students to select as many of the different coloured squares as they needed from the shape bank on the right hand side. This was a quick activity to create and we are looking forward to seeing our students explore symmetry more in the coming weeks. We used a white background in activinspire so we hope these aren't too confusing.

One of the beginning activities. Student pull shapes from the right side to make a
horizontal line of shapes.

One of the more advanced pictures. Students pull shapes from the right side
to make a large square.

Simple Organizing Trick

In our class six of our eight students are working on various levels of picture exchange, so we have six binders and a ton of picture symbols. Our students are sometimes indiscriminate when it comes to whose binder they take the symbols from (even though they are almost all different colours). This has caused us to end up with binders with three symbols for the same item. We tried keeping lists of who had what symbol in their binder but since we are always adding symbols we weren't able to keep up. We now use a simple trick to keep ourselves and our students organized:

We label the back of each picture symbol with the students first initial.