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!