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

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.

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.

 

 

We All Go Traveling By

My students have really been enjoying the book We All Go Traveling By by Sheena Roberts. Each page has a different method of travel in a different colour and a specific noise. I made an activity where after reading the story my students identify the colour of the specific object from three choices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hibernation Station Activities

This month we read the story Hibernation Station by Michelle Meadows. I made an activity for the Promethean to go along with it. In the activity students move pictures of animals onto a train. We stop on each page while reading to see which animals need to be added. Then we match animals and then there are several pages of counting animals.



Circle Time Activity

Here is our circle time/attendance activity. We usually do this right after lunch as some of our students are at integration in the morning and three days a week we have gym.

On our attendance page students move their name/pictures to the picture of the classroom. "Jessica's" picture is attached to an invisible line and using "Move along a path" it only allows her to move it a certain way in order to teach her to move items on the board.

 

On the next page we are working on identifying staff members and answering yes/no questions. The universal no, and the green yes circle are done with "drag a copy" allowing the students to use as many as necessary. We ask the student if they saw the person today/if we will see (referring to our visual schedule) and then model a yes/no response for them. The students then select the appropriate response and move it to the person.



 

On the next page we dress "Billy" for the weather. We discuss what we wore today and what he needs to wear and students take turns adding a piece of clothing.

On the next page our special helper gets to select a song for us to sing. When they press the song picture it jumps to the visuals for that specific song.

 

 

Here is a sample of the visuals for the songs. (This is our current favourite).

Why I Love the Bitsboard App for iPad

I love the Bitsboard App for the iPad!

We have one iPad in my classroom that was generously donated by students at Whitney Public School who fund-raised in order to buy it for us. My class is made up of a combination of verbal and non-verbal students. Earlier this year we were having trouble assessing our students using a variety of techniques including the Brigance. My EA and I both felt that our students were not engaged in the assessments. Last year I was told about Bitsboard by teachers at Beverly School, so I decided to set it up.

Bitsboard allows you to use pre-made libraries of images, sentences, adjectives, nouns, letters, numbers and all sorts of other categories. You can also build your own activity, for instance we are working on recognizing our names in print, so I took pictures of all my students names (typed out in Comics Sans). The pre-made libraries come with an audio prompt, and you can add your own audio to the libraries you create. Bitsboard then allows you to work on a variety of activities for each library. Below is an image of some of the activity choices.

So far we have mainly used the Flashcards and Photo Touch activities. The Photo Touch activity gives you options for how few and how many images you want displayed for the student to choose from. So far my students are only asked to select the correct answer from a maximum of three choices, and we have had amazing success. The students I have been using Bitsboard with are so engaged by it, that they are able to work through multiple boards. (Even better - Bitsboard scores the activity for you so you can keep track - not on the actual program but I just write down how they did in my notebook as they work. See sample below). 

Prior to using Bitsboard I would tell you that some of my students could not consistently recognize any letters, shapes or colours. I WAS WRONG! One of my students who has a very limited attention span, showed me that she can identify at least 7 letters, 4 colours and knows a lot of descriptive words (i.e. running, drinking, crying). 

If you do have an iPad in your classroom, I encourage you to download it from the App store. I believe the App only costs $2.99, which is an amazing price for such a useful App.

We're Going on a Bear Hunt

This week we did our initial reading of We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. I created a short Smart Board activity to accompany the read aloud. During the read aloud, we pause to put the different settings from the story in the correct order. A few of my students are beginning to read, so I created a cloze activity from the last page of the story for them. I also took two pictures of the bear from the story and asked the students how they think the bear feels based on facial expression and body language (no, I didn't use those terms). My students are big fans of memory games so I created a memory game to play at the end with different pictures of bears.

 

We're Going on a Bear Hunt Google Docs

Big and Little

One of my students is working on the attribute stage of PECs training. She has mastered colours and I wanted to introduce her to other attributes. I decided to start with Big and Little as it is a concept that we use a lot. In this activity I also have one of the pre-made games from the Lesson Activity Tool Kit. I use the vortex to get the students to sort pictures of Big and Little objects.

Big and Little Google Docs

Letter Matching

Some of my students are learning to match upper and lower case letters. I have a task box (see Activities and Tasks) that does this but here is the corresponding Smart Board activity. I found that more than 4 letters per page was too busy. Just make sure to check your fonts to ensure that your 'a' is this type of a as it is the most recognizable for students.

Google Docs for Letter Match