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.