New Journal Prompts

I am super excited about this new writing tool we got from my latest donorschoose grant (check out this post for info on donorschoose!)  As a part of our morning group, we write a journal together as a class.  (Some of my more advanced students write their journal on their own now!)  For awhile, I was just choosing a topic (i.e. bears or firefighters) and having students come up with any sentence related to that topic.  With this new tool, students take turns picking a "who," "what," and "where" card to guide us in our journal writing.  We are working on elaborating on a more specific topic.  Now, if we get "Bear" "Biking" and "Snow" we have a lot more details to add to our story.  We also have to come up with other sentences that are related to this same topic.

Spring Break FREEBIE!

All right, all right, I know spring break doesn't happen for a couple more weeks for most of us, but I am getting ready to start preparing my students already!  Like most kids with autism, my students struggle with change in their routine.  Well, school IS their routine.  My kids love coming to school... they love the structure and they know exactly what to expect, for the most part, each day.  When my kids saw the March calendar with an ENTIRE week of "no school,"  some of them seemed a little nervous.  We talk about spring break while we do calendar every morning, but I also like to send home this social story to help parents explain spring break to their children.  

Currently: March!

I am so happy it is finally March!  Spring is almost here (fingers crossed...currently there is a snow storm blowing around outside my windows!).  So what better way than to celebrate a new month than with Farley's Currently Linky Party.  Click here to join in!  

Great Target Find!

While shopping at Target a couple weeks ago, I came across these great dry-erase activities in the dollar spot!  A couple people have asked me how I keep students on such a tight schedule?  What happens when students finish their work ahead of schedule?  Well, one great thing to do for students who finish ahead of schedule is keep a basket of extra work around.  I have a couple great dry-erase books for writing and math practice as well as some puzzles in my extra work basket.  For the dry erase books, students are able to complete a few pages in the activity book and then later, an assistant can erase the book so it is ready for use the next day.  When I saw these cool spinner/dry erase activities in the dollar spot, I thought they would be a great addition to my basket of extra work!

Lucky Charms Graphing and FREEBIE!

We usually use this activity as a station at our St. Patrick's day party...but it doesn't hurt for my kids to do it more than once this month!  I think we will use this on Thursday, when our high school volunteers come in!  

More Advanced Sorting File Folders

So many file folders that I see are more for basic skills like sorting by shape, size, or color.  These are great for my beginner learners, but as they get more advanced, I want some more challenging tasks for them.  I LOVE file folders because they are easy to store and are re-useable.  I get so tired of making photo copies of worksheets, so these are a great replacement!  The only downside is, often times, kids just end up memorizing what goes where and not truly mastering the topics.  This is just an important thing to keep in mind and make sure we use a variety of activities or methods to assess mastery of skills.

March Madness

In honor of the first day of March, today I am giving away this FREE story about March Madness.  My kids participate in basketball for Special Olympics, so we LOVE basketball.  Every year, we follow the March Madness basketball tournament in our classroom.  Some of our more advanced students keep their own brackets and we even have a poster sized bracket that we hang in the hallway.  

We usually review the scores the day after the games.  Either we look them up on the internet or I tell them the scores and they have to update their brackets.  Using the March Madness bracket is an awesome way to work on "more" and "less" math skills. 

"If Team A has 45 points and Team B had 30 point, who had more?  Who won?"  Questions like these are so hard for my students to answer, so why not address it through a more motivating topic?!  

Click here to get your copy of the March Madness social story.  Sorry, brackets aren't out until later this month, or I would have included that for you as well!