Literacy!

 Time I would love to say that I have literacy for my kiddos all figured out, but the truth is...I'm far from it. I am very excited to attend a literacy training on Nov. 10th and I anticipate a major overhaul will occur, but for now, this is what my literacy with my lower reading students looks like!

 I've recently started having stations twice a week within our literacy time. This allows my students to work with the text much like a general ed classroom Daily 5 time! The first staton pictured has students spell the high frequency words using large letter magnets. The second shows students matching biard maker pictures to the words as my staff models where to find this word within the students' PODD if needed. The third picture shows sentence sequencing where students work on anything from sight word identification (staff asks "give me....") to putting the sentence together appropriately. I didn't snap a picture of the last station, but the last station is a "magic wand" staton where students are either asked to "magically pick up" a certain word or they pick up their own and say the word aloud.

On the other days we focus on language combined with literacy. We recently ready the book "There Was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bat", therefore our sentience starter of the week was "I see a bat...". We learned a little about bats prior and then students choose which action they wanted to use to complete the sentence. We work with the sentence all week with word hints, sentence sequencing, high frequency word mastery, the stationsand much more. Again, after my professional development on the 10th, I'm sure I'll make big changes, but for now we're learning through these strategies!

 Lastly, my phenomenal Speech-Language Pathologist works in tandem with me for her sessions with my kiddies! This week they made a spider snack (spider is close enough to bat...right?!) while working on using sentence strips and communicating needs. 

 

This year I feel myself learning and growing all the time as its my first year with a roster of students who I can put together in a group that makes sense. It's been challenging, but I love the challenge and the progress in which I'm seeing in my students is more than worth it! 

Happy Sunday everyone!

Literacy!

 Time I would love to say that I have literacy for my kiddos all figured out, but the truth is...I'm far from it. I am very excited to attend a literacy training on Nov. 10th and I anticipate a major overhaul will occur, but for now, this is what my literacy with my lower reading students looks like!

 I've recently started having stations twice a week within our literacy time. This allows my students to work with the text much like a general ed classroom Daily 5 time! The first staton pictured has students spell the high frequency words using large letter magnets. The second shows students matching biard maker pictures to the words as my staff models where to find this word within the students' PODD if needed. The third picture shows sentence sequencing where students work on anything from sight word identification (staff asks "give me....") to putting the sentence together appropriately. I didn't snap a picture of the last station, but the last station is a "magic wand" staton where students are either asked to "magically pick up" a certain word or they pick up their own and say the word aloud.

On the other days we focus on language combined with literacy. We recently ready the book "There Was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bat", therefore our sentience starter of the week was "I see a bat...". We learned a little about bats prior and then students choose which action they wanted to use to complete the sentence. We work with the sentence all week with word hints, sentence sequencing, high frequency word mastery, the stationsand much more. Again, after my professional development on the 10th, I'm sure I'll make big changes, but for now we're learning through these strategies!

 Lastly, my phenomenal Speech-Language Pathologist works in tandem with me for her sessions with my kiddies! This week they made a spider snack (spider is close enough to bat...right?!) while working on using sentence strips and communicating needs. 

 

This year I feel myself learning and growing all the time as its my first year with a roster of students who I can put together in a group that makes sense. It's been challenging, but I love the challenge and the progress in which I'm seeing in my students is more than worth it! 

Happy Sunday everyone!

Pumpkin Fun!

This week we had a great time investigating and observing pumpkins!

We started with an emergent reader which focused on sight words, color words and counting. It also required coloring throughout the book!

We then learned about the parts of a pumpkin in our next emergent reader before we dug on in! 

Not everyone loved the feel of the guts of the pumpkin, but they did all at least attempt to touch the pulp!

We also had a pumpkin investigation day where we rotated through stations of describing the pumpkin, reviewing the parts, predicting whether it will sink or float and ended with painting our pumpkins! Some students were provided with board maker picture options for their observation booklets, while other students were provided with word banks and one student wrote completely on his own. We had a lot of fun with this activity!  (I found all of my resources on Teacher Pay Teachers, check out Mrs. Jones' Creation Stations, Pumpkins Literacy, Math and Science Activites!)

 I apologize for my hiatus, I didn't realize so much time had gone by without me sharing! 

Pumpkins! and a #tbt of course!

Pumpkin Fun!

We started the kickoff to pumpkin fun this week with two different activities during calendar time. The first was "5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate", which we watched on Youtube. I love the ViewPure (viewpure.com) which allows all videos to be viewed with no commercials or adds :) 

We started the week by just watching the video, as the kids wouldn't have been able to focus on anything else without watching it first! The next day we walked through the song on our own (I'd like to say I'm brave enough to sing but I wasn't confident enouch with this new tune to do that!) using our story board (made in Boardmaker). I also picked up the pumpkins and acted it out as much as possible with them as well!

The rest of the week we've been/are working with the book interactive book "Orange Pumpkin, Orange pumpkin, what do you see?" (which I found on Boardmaker).

With the interactive books students are given a picture to add to the book when the picture they have is mentioned. In this one, each page had a character to add (brown owl, yellow moon, green ghost, etc.). I will ask "Who has...." and we're working on the students replying "I do!" before adding their piece to the book. We also work on colors as we're working on learning to sign the colors right now! 

Tomorrow we'll end the week with a tear and glue, pumpkin project :)

Next week we're digging deep into learning about pumpkins during our afternoon literacy group. We will be starting with a pumpkin investigation on Monday where we cut open and experience pumpkins. Throughout the week we'll learn about the parts of a pumpkin, the pumpkin life cycle and we will be working on sight words through a couple of emergent readers I was lucky enough to find on Teacher Pay Teachers! A lot of materials I also found on Mrs Jones' Creation Station, "Pumpkins Literacy, Math and Science Activities" on herTeacher Pay Teacher page! There is a ton of good stuff in that pack!

I have a quick #tbt for you :) There was one time that a staff told a student of mine that they were a "smart cookie". My student's reply was "I'm not a food, I'm a human!" Still gives me a nice little chuckle!

Little Moments that mean Everything!

Today my room experienced a couple of especially exciting moments! :) The first two experiences came as I looked around the room during our calendar time. First I noticed, as I looked around, total engagement from our students (granted during a 30 minute time period, we still had our moments!), but a good amount of the time they were all engaged! Reflecting on where we started at the beginning of the year with calendar time, this is a huge improvement.

Secondly, during my observations I started noticing a kiddo who typically verbalizes very little, was verbal continuously throughout calendar time. Not only was he verbalizing but he was signing along with the signs we've learned so far! I've never heard a sweeter voice :) I can not describe the emotions I experienced during today's calendar time. In just 36 school days I am already seeing so many gains in our students! These little moments (and today there were a couple of big ones!) are everything for us educators! 

Another moment came from a student who is often so stuck in his own schedule and what he's doing next that we often only hear "iPad, go home" from this buddy. But today, as another teacher in the room started sneezing we heard "bless you" from him, and multiple times! Yes, this is a little moment, but it was VERY exciting for the adults in our room :) 

Stay tuned tomorrow for Starkey's room kicking off pumpkin learning! 

Fall fun with a little #tbt

Tonight is conferences night, so while waiting between meetings and conferences, I remembered "take pictures!". 

But first, my throwback of the week: a couple of years ago I started dying my hair darker and darker. While my mom had never liked me dying my hair, I had never thought anything more of it. Until one day I came back to work after a pretty drastic going darker dye. My one student came in and gave me his usual halfway greeting in the morning until he glanced up at me when I asked for his eyes. What I got next were wide eyes and a terrified face (I didn't think I was that scary looking!) Next thing he says, "Miss Richardson! Somebody painted your hair!!!". While giggling I informed him that I had decided to dye my hair. He replied "Nooooooo Miss Richardson! We don't paint our hair, we only paint paper!". It reminded me that simple things like a hair cut and hair dying which is simple maintence to many of us is actually a huge change and quite stressful for some of our kiddos! Oh the things we take for granted...


Now...back to fall!!

One of my favorite things from this week were the literacy activities that we did. We started with an Aimee Solutions interactive book "Fall" that talked about what we "do" in the fall. This was great for my kiddos who are working on actions!

We also worked on actions with leaves with the book "Fresh Fall Leaves". We used fake leaves from Michaels and acted out blowing, raking, throwing, etc. with the leaves. In conjunction with my amazing SLP, we used real life pictures and Boardmaker pictures which match their alternative communication devices to discuss actions we do or can do with leaves. It was a lot of fun to watch my friends act out and play with the leaves!

For my higher reading kiddos I added a more difficult book and we worked on nouns and verbs. "When the Leaf Blew In" is a perfect way to have fun learning about nouns and verbs in the fall!

For writing we worked on sight words and making sentences. The sight words were the Color by "Code" and the sentences we did at the end of the week after we'd talked extensively over different actions you can do in the leaves. The kids either wrote their sentence independently or they had each word cut out individually then chose which action they wanted to fill their sentence in with. A lot of my students liked to either jump in the leaves or throw the leaves :)

Lastly, we just had some fun with some fall crafts! We ripped paper and covered apples and did some sponge painting of fall colors then traced out hands and arms to make the trunk and the branches! 

Next week we start two weeks on pumpkins, so stay tuned for those activities!

Terrific Tuesday!

Happy Tuesday!

I am still working on remembering to take pictures of all of the fun fall things wer're doing in Starkey's room, but I can share a few things that we've done already. The past couple of days I borrowed an "I like Autumn" emergent reader from Kindergarten Kel's TPT account. In this emergent reader, my students practied sight words such as "I", "my" and "like", while also matching boardmaker pictures to the fall items within the reader such as pumpkin, scarecrow and animals.

Another fun activity involved reading "Fresh Fall Leaves", an easy reader I came across in our book sets library. This book has a lot of fun action words associated with fall and leaves, which is perfect as we're working a lot with actions! With a package of fake leaves from Michaels we had fun "acting out" the verbs. We threw them in the air, used our fingers to "rake" the leaves and much more. It was a super fun way to get the kiddos interacting with the book.

Adapted, interactive books are a great way to get our students with low interest in reading involved and engaged!

Pictures to come soon!

With three years worth of teaching stories to catch up on, I feel it's only appropriate to start a weekly #tbt (Throwback Thursday)! 

One of my worst but favorite memories of my teaching career thus far is a time that I often look back on and laugh about now. I was working with 9th through 12th graders and attempting to teach "citizenship". I thought it was important for my students to understand their rights and responsibilities for being citizens in our great country, and the extremely special community we live in. So as I'm being observed by my principal, I'm tfailing at attempting to engage my students  in our "discussion" over our "rights" and "responsibilities". We had done sorts, created webs, watched videos, I'm not even sure what else. At some point (after a good 10 minutes straight of only blank stares) it became quite obvious this lesson was an awful decision, especially while being observed by my principal in my second year of teaching! So to wrap it up, I said one last time "Okay friends, who can tell me one of our rights as a citizen?" And next thing I know, my student starts screaming, arms flying and all, "But what about the wrongs Miss Richardson?! But what about the wrongs?!". At this point, my only option was to laugh; luckily, I noticed my principal was as well. 

Lesson #1: stick to lessons you know have the best opportunity of being successful when being observed. Luckily, I had a principal that could find the humor in the chaos with me while we talked about what I could (and should) have done differently!

Lesson #2: When you know your students are literal, black and white thinking students, make something abstract like citizenship literal! The biggest lesson I took away from that was my lesson was poorly planned and did not take into account my students' needs. It was much too abstract for them and simply wasn't meaningul for them. In other words: fail.

Lesson #3: laugh. If I took all of my mess ups, embarassing moments and failures to heart, I'd already be done with the profession I love so much. So instead, I choose to laugh.

"I'm moving to Alaska!"

Recently in our classroom we've entered the "hormones of 10 year olds" phase...and I'll say, it's a doozy! My favorite quote from today was "I'm moving to Alaska!". This poor kiddo is simply not himself. Our talkative, loving, aiming to please buddy has gone to consistent yelling and telling you that he's going home, or like today, moving to Alaska. I'm working like crazy to come up with visual schedules, work systems, visual redirections and anything else I can think of, but I'm currently at a loss. However, I can remember how bad puberty was as a typically developing girl, so I can only imagine how puberty is for my buddies!

On a different note, this week we're kicking off fall right in  Mrs. Starkey's room! Pictures to come of all the ways we're celebrating the coming of a new season!

Happy Sunday!

This weekend I attempted to take some time off of work to spend time with the hubby, and while I did accomplish that yesterday, I find myself working yet again while he's out at a golf tournament :)

One of the first things I wanted to share with you is the calendar time that my students and I do everyday on my Mimio Teach. I can't even begin to explain how big of a blessing this new piece of technology has been for my classroom! You will see the before picture which shows how I attempted to turn my white board into a manipulative calendar time, but that meant the white board couldn't be used for anything else. With a Mimio Teach, that whiteboard has endless possibilities!

Our Calendar Time follows this routine:

-Sign in and Songs/movement

-Month of the year (sing months of the year song while students point to each month as we sing in their calendar binder) (some students have a PODD or a different Augmentative or Alternative Communication device, so they would point to the months of the year as we sing in that)

-Days of the week (same flow as with months of the year)

-Today is, Yesterday was, Tomorrow will be...

-What is the date? (count the number to the date)

-Today is... (this is where we put the whole date together)

-Weather (what's the weather like today, with graphing and dressing the weather bear)

-Math (Count by 10's, Number of the day (count it, before/after, even/odd, tally it), How many days have we been in school (hundreds, tens, ones blocks), Time, Money

- Signs of the week

-More Songs/Movement!

If you have a Mimio Teach or MimioStudio Notebook, check out my interactive calendar time on MimioConnect!

http://www.mimioconnect.com/content/lesson/23806/calendar_time_elementary_special_education

Welcome!

I am absolutely new to this blogging world, but as a teacher of kiddos on the Autism spectrum, I am constantly experiencing funny moments, struggling moments and fun, new activities all the time! Therefore, why not share with other people in our wonderful profession?! Check back soon for my first official classroom blog :)