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.

Mat Man on the Interactive White Board

I recently created a Mat Man activity for the Interactive White Board, based on the same activity from Handwriting Without Tears. After listening to the song, we created Mat Man on the Interactive White Board and then the students were given the opportunity to draw Mat Man. I chose to use clip art for the eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hands as I felt it was more concrete for the students as opposed to circles and half-circles. We have been stacking the students drawings from month to month on the bulletin board so we can flip quickly through them to see their progress.

Here are our pictures for December.

Yoga

Last week we introduced a short yoga activity to the end of our Interactive White Board time twice a week. Yoga is a great way to develop self-regulation skills and gross motor skills. We have already seen a big improvement in the amount of time the students can attend to the Yoga video. So far we have been using "Bug Yoga" which involves three poses.

Bug Yoga

DIY Sensory Bag



 

We made this sensory bag using four easy to find items. We got a heavy duty Ziploc bag from our stock order (TDSB stock catalogue) and added 2 bottles of coloured hair gel from Dollarama, and a whole bunch of sparkles. We then taped all the way around on the seams with packing tape. The students have been enjoying using this on the light table (as seen below), drawing shapes, tracing letters, and making hand prints.

 

 

Door Knob

One of our students is very interested in how things work. He is especially interested in the class door latch mechanism. In order to stop him from investigating its mechanics and opening the door throughout the day, which is a safety risk with other friends, I built him his own knob. Our classroom has an accessible handle rather than a turn-knob, but I am hoping he will be just as interested in this one as the real one.

Step-By-Step for Morning Annoucements

We are very excited to have our students do the Morning Announcements for three days next week!Some of our friends in other classes recorded the morning message for our non-verbal students. We are looking forward to having the opportunity to take part in this part of the school day.

O'Canada

Every morning we watch the American Sign Language video of O'Canada in conjunction with the anthem being played over the announcements. The version we watch was created by staff at the Metropolitan School for the Deaf in the TDSB. You can see the video below.

Watch O'Canada in ASL

World Autism Awareness Day

Today we celebrated World Autism Awareness Day with a blue wearing bubble party.

I thought I would share some of my favourite quotes about Autism:

“Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. … But autism … is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over-expression of the very traits that make our species unique.”
― Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism

From Ten Things Every Child With Autism Wished You Knew

I am a child with autism. I am not “autistic.” My autism is one aspect of my total character. It does not define me as a person. Are you a person with thoughts, feelings and many talents, or are you just fat (overweight), myopic (wear glasses) or klutzy (uncoordinated, not good at sports)?

The following quote is about disability in general and it is very profound:

“Children with disabilities are stronger than we know, they fight the battles that most will never know.”
― Misti Renea Neely

Sensory Combination

Our students have been big fans of the multi-coloured rice bin for sensory play. A fellow teacher added a picture of students using a sandbox on the light table (thanks Pinterest), so today we placed our rice bin on the light table. The students really enjoyed the added sensory input of the light shining through rice.

Creating swirls in the rice. This made for a really interesting video as well.

Literacy Group Activity

In the past month we have been working hard on developing early literacy skills with our students. Our students are big fans of Brown Bear, Brown Bear Who Do You See? and similar books. We created picture symbol boards with all the characters from Brown Bear for several of our students. Each student has a board, one member of the staff read the story and the group is asked who they see on the page. The students then pull off and hand the picture symbol of the appropriate character to the staff member reading the story. We are using similar pictures to the ones in the book. We used plastic Dollarama clipboards as the base, these allow us to have four "pages" in order to add the symbols for different stories. We recently added the Boardmaker pictures for the animals found in Polar Bear, Polar Bear Who Do You Hear?.



3D Wooden Puzzle Tower

Last week I was looking through some of the vendor catalogues for some new materials for my class. I found an interesting puzzle tower but it was more than $50. I decided I could make a similar toy for much cheaper. After a Home Depot run I spent a couple hours building it in my dad's workshop. I left the wood unfinished as it fits more with our school's natural materials philosophy. I bought enough wood to make two, so the grand total for one of the puzzles was only about $10.