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.

How to Make Multi-Coloured Rice for Sensory Play

Here is the instructions for making the multi-coloured rice that we use:

1. Put one cup of rice in a medium sized bowl

2. Add a couple tablespoons of water

3. Add a few drops of food colouring (whatever colours you want), the more food colouring you add the deeper the colour

4. Stir until blended and it is the colour you want.

5. Spread on a baking sheet to dry

6. Occasionally stir the rice around to ensure all the rice dries

7. Repeat until you have as much rice as you want

8. Store in an air-tight container

9. Take to school and enjoy

Matching Activity

Today I created a new matching activity. I used a small binder so the students also work on turning the page to continue to work. This activity can be changed to make it more difficult. For instance the pictures that are matched can be black and white or the same character but not the exact same picture.