Matching Colors

I may have discussed my fondness for "Do a Dot" bingo markers earlier in the year, and I am still in love!  First of all, my kids enjoy using them.  This makes my life a lot easier because I can just take out the bingo markers, and they are instantly ready to work!  At the beginning of the year, one of my students could not attend to anything on a piece of paper.  If you gave him paper and a writing utensil, he would just go to town scribbling everywhere.  Over the course of the year, we tried to do a lot of activities to work on attending.  Without the ability to attend to a variety of tasks, anyone would have trouble learning much of anything.

Over the year, he has mastered a variety of in-lay puzzles, the ability to match pictures, and the ability to trace a variety of lines (among other things!).  This may not seem like much, but this little guy has made so much progress, he amazes me every day.  In the beginning of the year, he could not even sit at a table and work for a minute independently.  Now, he can follow a schedule and work for periods of time on his own!  Anyways...I digress...back to Do a dots.  

This was an activity I though up on the fly and took seconds to set up.  I just took a variety of color markers and drew some circles on a piece of paper.  Then I handed my little guy one Do a Dot marker and wanted him to match the correct color and make a dot in the circle.  He took a couple of prompts to get started, but then he was off!  He was scanning the paper very carefully to make sure he found every circle for each color.  When he got them all, I handed him the next color....and so on, until the paper was full of colorful dots.  I was so excited that he was so focused and engaged in this activity (something I didn't see at all in the beginning of the year).  Also, I loved this activity, because it truly shows that he has mastered and generalized the skill of matching colors.  Sometimes, with activities like matching colors in file folders, our kids just memorize the task.  However, this was a completely new task for him and the colors didn't even match perfectly, but he was able to do it!