TGIF...Summer Count Down

Well, we have officially started our countdown to summer...it is still a long ways off (16 school days to be exact!).  We made this paper chain this week, and have been cutting off one piece per day.  I remember making paper chains like this in school growing up and saw some bloggy friends doing it as well, so I decided to do it with my kids as well.  As I we were putting it together, I realized how many goals I could target.  

Rebus Stories FREE

Do you ever have a time where you find an old activity you forgot about??  I found one this week that I love...and it is available for free here at abcteach.com.  

They are rebus stories that have pictures incorporated into the stories.  My early readers love these, because they feel like they are actually reading!  The picture supports not only help them understand, but also encourage them to be independent readers.  

Scrapbooks

Scrapbooks are something my students look forward to making all year.  In years past, we would make one page every month.  However, this year, I decided to wait until the end of the year and put the whole thing together then.  Last week, I ordered over 500 pictures of our entire school year...pictures of field trips, holiday parties, working around the classroom, and any other special moments.  I divided the pictures up by student and stored them in baggies.  The kids got such a kick out of looking through all the photos of themselves!  This is a super motivating activity to encourage speech from my students....they love to talk about each picture, the event going on, who they are with, etc.

Memorial Day Sale

Happy Memorial Day!  In honor of the holiday (and day off of work!!!), I am having a sale.  My entire store will be 20% off today only.  I can't even tell you how excited I am to have today off.  Not only do I get an extra day to my weekend, but we also only have a 4-day week left when we go back tomorrow!  Hooray!  

Research Projects and Presentations

Next week, we are going on a double decker bus tour of our city (I got a grant for this through donors choose...see this post for more info).  We wanted to do this field trip because many of our students have lived in this city their entire lives and never seen some of the major landmarks in person.  Even when we were driving to special olympics a few weeks ago, the kids were ooohing and awwing over the smallest things they could see out the windows of the bus (like the lake, a train, etc.).  

Robot Craft

I have been off my regular blogging routine...and I don't even have a good excuse.  I have been obsessed with being lazy and doing nothing school related in my time off.  I don't know what it is about this time of year and how exhausted work makes me...maybe the 90 degree work days?  or the fact that I'm trying to plan for the rest of this year as well as for my new class next year?  Well...anyways, after being a lump for the last couple weeks, I am ready to get back into my normal routine again!

This week was very busy with a lot of visitors.  We often have people in our room to observe, however, this week we had a visitor come to actually interact with the kids!  Mr. David came from Camp Red Kite (a camp for kids with autism) to do an interactive art/drama activity with the kids.  They made robots displaying different emotions.  He started by posting these awesome picture directions that he had made!

Emotion Book

Earlier this year, I posted about an adapted book I made to work on identifying emotions.  My kids love this book, because it features pictures of them on each page displaying different emotions.  Here are some examples from the books I made.  Each page has 2 choices of emotions.  As the students read the book, they are supposed to velcro a star on the correct emotion the person is feeling.