November Fun

As we are finishing up the month of November, here is a look at some special things we have enjoyed in the classroom recently.

Reader's Workshop:
The focus of the lessons for our Reader's Workshop unit the past few weeks have been about reading with a friend.  I've found that for our classroom, the skills the children are learning from these lessons are actually functional skills.  It has been challenging for the students to learn to sit beside a classmate (Elbow to Elbow, Knee to Knee) and to share one book.  They are continuing to make progress, but this is something they have had to work extra hard to accomplish!

Social Skills Group:
In preparation for Thanksgiving, our social skills group with Ms. Weston (School Social Worker) and Mrs. Frazee (Speech and Language Therapist) focused on table manners.  The students practiced saying "please" and "thank you" as well as asking for items on the table ("please pass the potatoes").  We continued to practice this skill throughout the week.  We also talked about the importance of using utensils for eating, and waiting our turn.  Mrs. Frazee even brought some cranberry sauce for brave students to try!

Pumpkin Pie:
As a group we followed a recipe to bake a pumpkin pie.  The students were practicing taking turns, stirring, saying the names of different ingredients, and most of all having fun!  Later in the day, students had a chance to have a slice of their pie.  The pie smelled delicious, but among the students the Cool-Whip on top was loved the most!  :)

 

 

 

Turkey Art:
Miss Minto planned a fun turkey art project for art class last week too.  Each feather of the turkey had a different material and the students rotated from station to station adding the items to their turkeys.  She did an outstanding job of incorporation fine motor practice and sensory needs into one project!

 

Word Study:
We are working on a set of new words during our word study time and centers. We are learning to sound out words in the _ot family as well as continue our sight word practice.

hot
got
pot
spot
and
go
to
the

There are a series of videos on youtube that sing sight words and letters.  We occasionally watch the sight word videos for words we are working on, and the students also love the Alphabet Phonics Song.  You can find the videos at this link.
 

I hope everyone has had a nice Thanksgiving break!

Brrrr!

As a reminder - please be sure to send your child to school with a hat and gloves.  It is beginning to get very cold and windy outside, and we do go out for recess every day.

It has been an easy transition back to school after our first week off.  I'm very proud of how well all the students have gone right back into our routine! :)

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!  

Here are a few pictures from our party last Thursday.

Mr. Bob, one of our classroom paraprofessionals, was a hit in his Tigger costume!

We are waiting for the parade of students to come by in their costumes.  It was very noisy and there was a lot of waiting... but EVERYONE did an outstanding job.  I was so proud of the kids for handling the sensory overload!

We played a bean-bag toss game to win bags of goodies.

 

At another center we made cotton ball ghosts.

 

We also enjoyed some yummy popcorn, orange cups, and juice!

I hope everyone is having a nice break.  We will be back to school on Monday, November 5th. 

Have a fun and safe night of Trick or Treating :)

Nutrition Presentation

If anyone is interested, I received an email about a presentation on nutrition for children with special needs.  I know that many of you have mentioned that you have a difficult time getting your child to eat many foods. 

If you have any questions, you may contact Jean Baber from the LCISD Ed Tech Center at (810) 667 - 6166.

Pumpkin Fun

Remember - Tomorrow, Thursday, October 25th our Halloween Party will take place from 2:00 - 3:00.  We will be participating in the school parade at around 2:15.  The rest of the party will be spent enjoying some fun Halloween centers, snacks, and showing off our costumes.


Pumpkin Investigation: This week we completed a "Pumpkin Investigation."  The kids were excited to be able to get their hands on the pumpkin, and today - IN the pumpkin!  We listed words to describe our pumpkin on the outside, guessed how many lines were on the outside of the pumpkin, the color of the inside, and predicted how many squares tall the pumpkin would be.  It was a great combination of math skills (counting, measuring, and prediction) and the opportunity to practice our speech and vocabulary.

 

Today we cut open the pumpkin to see what color was on the inside.  (We decided on orange and yellow!)  A few adventurous students dug right in!

Mat Man: This week we began working with Mat Man from the Handwriting Without Tears program.  It is designed to teach body awareness, counting, drawing, and pre-writing skills.  There is an interactive game online here.  We sing as we build our Mat Man together, each student takes a turn placing a body part on Mat Man.  The kids also made their own Mat Man pieces that they have started to build on their own at their desks.

Mat Man made as a group from wooden pieces.

Student created Mat Man pieces.

 

An October Update

It's hard to believe our first trimester is almost over!  The past few months have gone by so quickly, and the kids are continuing to work hard and show some outstanding progress!

Here's a look at what we've been up to lately...

Word Study: Today we began a new word family, _am words.  We are focusing on: am, ham, slam, ram, Pam, and the sight words: to, the.  We are using our letter sounds to build the words in each word family.  Words like to and the cannot be sounded out, so we are practicing them using songs and lots of repetition!  On Friday afternoon, we played Word Study BINGO using all the words we have learned since the beginning of the year.  It was amazing how well every student did with finding the words quickly.  I was so excited to see their progress.

Centers: The students are continuing to work well during our Reading/Writing and Math centers.  We use a visual timer to monitor the time spent at each center, and then rotate through each station.  Our Reading/Writing centers also have the pleasure of including our speech teacher Mrs. Frazee on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Mrs. Frazee runs her own center that always includes fun speech activities.  The students look forward to this center most of all!  She always brings exciting props and hands on activities that the children enjoy.  In addition to speech centers, we have also usually have at least one center focused on Word Study, one center focused on writing, and one center focused on letters and sounds.

Mrs. Frazee leads a fun fall center with apples.

We practice writing our letters in salt trays at a writing center.

 

Creating word family books at a Word Study Center.

Reader's Workshop: We have been working on the following Reader's Workshop lessons recently.

• Readers keep their eyes on the book.
• Readers think about the book they are reading.
• Readers reread books they enjoy.
• Readers read with a friend.

Life Skills: We have spent a lot of time working on identifying feelings.  Specifically happy, mad, and sad.  We also discussed things that could make us feel each of these feelings, and also what can we do to feel better again.  With the help of our school social worker, Ms. Weston, we have been introduced to self-calming break techniques from the Conscious Discipline series.  You can download the four calming techniques posters and also information about how to use them here.

Fun and Exciting News:

• LINKS (peer buddies) are now helping us in the morning coming into the building, at our lockers, and during breakfast time.  We have four LINKS, both boys and girls joining us each morning.  
• Our therapy dog from last school year, Pepper, is visiting us again on Thursday afternoons.  The kids look forward to her visit all week.

 

• Halloween Party: A note will go home tomorrow (Tuesday, October 16th) about our upcoming Halloween party.  Since we do not have school October 26th - November 4th, we will be having our Halloween party on Thursday, October 25th from 2:00 - 3:00pm.  Family and Friends are invited to attend.

2 Hour Delay Tomorrow

Just a reminder - there is a two hour delay tomorrow, Wednesday, September 19th.  Your child's bus will be picking them up 2 hours from their regular time.

Our day is scheduled to begin at 10:14.  We will be eating lunch at our regular time of 11:30am. 

Social Skills Group

Once a week we have the pleasure of welcoming our school social worker, Ms. Weston, and our speech teacher, Mrs. Frazee, into our classroom for a group lesson on social skills.  The lessons include fun activities that provide practice in skills such as turn taking, following directions, greeting others, etc.  So far this school year we have participated in a pretend grocery shopping experience, a game similar to hot potato, and some fun songs. 

This past week our group lesson was based on the skill of greeting others.  The students practiced making eye contact and using their words to say hello.  The video below shows a glimpse of the two activities from the lesson.  During the first activity the students took turns entering the classroom and greeting a friend and Ms. Weston.  In the second activity, the students pretended to be getting onto the school bus and greeting their driver.

 

 (I'm hoping by posting the video this way it will turn out clearer than the videos from last year's blog.  The video is hosted on my school youtube account, but is not available by search on youtube for privacy and safety reasons.)

New Word Family

If you notice to the right, we began working with a new word family today.  The _at family.  The specific words we are focusing on are:

at
cat
bat
hat
rat

Our _it words have moved onto our word wall, but we will continue to work them in for practice!

I have had a few questions about when LINKS will begin.  Right now, our school social worker is collecting the permission slips from the students who are signing up to be LINKS.  Once the permission slips are turned in, she will be assigning LINKS to each of our students.  I have provided her with different times and activities where LINK support would be beneficial for each child.  Things should be ready in the near future, thank you all for being interested in and supporting such a great program here at Turrill.

Dates to Remember

Just a Reminder...

There is no school for students August 29th - September 3rd.  Tomorrow (Tuesday) is our last day of school for the week.  Enjoy the long holiday weekend!


Thursday, September 6th (next week!) is school picture day.  Please send in your photo order form if you would like to order pictures.  I will take them before Thursday if you would like.  I also have extra forms if you need a new one.

Becoming Readers

A large portion of our day is spent on working towards becoming readers.  We work on many reading skills in our daily centers, but there are also two other important parts of our day designed to get everyone reading and working with letter sounds.

Zoo-Phonics:
Zoo-Phonics is a program designed to teach children letters and their sounds through a whole brain approach.  There is a zoo animal character associated with each letter, which I've found makes it much easier for the students to enjoy and remember the letters as we work with them.  Each letter also has a sound and signal attached to teach letter sounds.   

 

My favorite thing about Zoo-Phonics (other than I see kids learning and recognizing letter sounds very quickly!) is the way it combines movement with letters and sounds.  In our classroom, movement is so crucial!  I also like that with the students who may have difficulty with speech or making certain sounds, I can still tell that they recognize the letter by their ability to signal it. 

We practice the letters and sounds each day with flash cards, but I also have several games and activities which usually show up in our reading centers.  The kids' favorite game involves a collection of beanie babies that represent each letter.  They each choose a beanie baby, then I call for certain letters or sounds and we look for who is holding that letter's zoo character.

Students from last year are very familiar with the zoo-phonics program, and those students who came to us from ECSE also worked with this program last year.  In our classroom, we teach lowercase letters first for two reasons.  First, when we are looking at print in books the letters are mostly lowercase letters.  If the students are going to move towards reading, they need to recognize lowercase letters and their sounds fluently.  Second, children are exposed to uppercase letters constantly (puzzles, games, manipulatives, etc.).  They seem to come more easily to children than the lowercase letters because they are already being exposed so frequently.

Here is a video of the letter cards with their sounds and signals.  The woman in the video is a bit boring, but this is pretty close to what we practice each day.  (If you search for Zoo-Phonics on YouTube, there are more interesting videos.  This was the best model of the true signals and sounds.)  In our classroom, I include the letter name in the characters name (ex: Bubba Bear = Bubba B Bear.  Or, Inny Inchworm = Inny I Inchworm) to help teach letter names too.

Word Study: We are also working on recognizing some basic sight words.  This year I am teaching the words in families.  This week we are finishing up our work with the "it" word family.  We focused on 5 words:  it, hit, mit, pit, sit  Since we are learning so many of the letter sounds with our zoo-phonics practice, the children are doing a great job with using the signals and sounds to decode the words.  We spend time each day working with our words before adding them to our word wall and moving on to the next family.  One word study activity from this week was to create a book of the words using cereal pieces.  The children had to trace each letter in glue and then cover the shape of the letter in cereal.

Placing the cereal on the glue helped work on our fine motor skills too!

We also practiced how to use glue, it can be a tricky (and messy!) skill to discover.

I am adding a box to the right of the words we are currently practicing.  I will update the list as our words change.  I am planning on every two weeks at this point, but it will depend on whether or not the students need more or less time with a family as we move along.  Keep in mind that your child may be able to read or identify words but not able to vocalize it.  For example, if I write the word "sit" on a piece of paper and ask some students to "read" it, they would be unable to vocalize that word aloud.  But, if I write the words sit, mit, and hit on a paper and then ask them to point to sit, they may be able to show me that they can identify the word.  This activity also becomes an instant "game" if you can find a small toy to replace just pointing.  For example, I found some small rubber frogs at the dollar store who like to "hop" onto the correct word.