Preparing for an activity and getting the materials out that you need takes executive functioning skills that can be difficult for young children and students with special needs.  By providing them with a visual support system to prepare for center and desk work students gain the life skills necessary to be responsible and independent! For example, at the art center, we have a box of supplies for each work area.  In each box, we have the materials students need for art instruction: crayons, markers, glue stick, pencils, colored pencils, and Elmer's glue as well as a What I need for ..read more

Time to take a look at room two of our kindergarten through fifth grade life skills classroom.  Click below for the video tour! This room is more small group and center based.  Our kindergarten through first grade students work through a rotation of teacher led and student led activities twice a day in this space. This took three adults, and significant planning, zoning, scheduling and structuring for our little guys, however by the end of the year they rolled through it like rock stars!  Each working at their own individual level on everything from following one step dir ..read more

Howdy, I am finally back and I proud to say. . . I survived my first year teaching elementary students!  The learning curve was steep coming from the world of early childhood but absolutely AMAZING!  I can't wait to share everything my staff and I created throughout year one.    I started the year with 11 students and 5 paraprofessionals and end the year with 14 students and 6 paraprofessionals.  All 14 students, have a variety of needs and abilities, ranging from a cognitive level of 12 months to 8 years.  Each student has their own programming, schedule, and ra ..read more

Several months ago,  I shared a few of my favorite classroom jobs.  Today I bring you one more jobs- Milk Count! Originally, my students were doing one to one correspondence with the milk visual below that sat inside dish tubs.  Students would deliver the dish tubs to the three kindergarten classrooms at snack using our delivery cart.  (NOTE: There are more than 12 students in each kindergarten class but only those that choose to pay for milk do 'special snack milk'.) At semester I realized it was time for a revamp.  Although the students the job was designed ..read more

Do you have students who struggle to sit at their desks?  If so this post is for you! This year, we started the school year with several students who struggled to sit at their desks, let along do desk work and participate in classroom activities. As my colleagues and I began to brainstorm how we can help these students, we began reading about the Flexible Classroom.    In taking this concept a step further, I began to think about students with Autism.  Many students with Autism have overwhelming sensitivities and preferences within their environment.  For example, on ..read more

I often get asked how I keep up with it all!  Sometimes I actually wonder this myself, but I will say one of my key timesavers is the way I organize my classroom centers.  Each week we focus on a letter and a number.  Each day, we do fifteen to twenty minute rotations at the literacy center, math center, and art center to work on concepts related to the letter and number of the week.  As you can see in the photos each center is also detailed with a color. Red is literacy, orange is art, and blue is math.  This helps our students know where to go for each activity ..read more

Recently, I had the opportunity to preview Hanen’s 2017 Calendar: Building Language and Literacy Through Powerful Conversations.  Wow!  What an opportunity it was!  The calendar is a great addition to any home or classroom that supports young children with social and communication needs. As stated on the inside cover of the calendar, “quantity of words matter, but the quality of the interaction matters more!”   When we are in the middle of a busy day, this concept can unfortunately be forgotten as we rush to get the students to the next activity, cook supper for our ..read more

Click below to get the handout and resource page from our session.   Powerpoint Handout Resource Page Did you miss the conference?  Click here to learn more about conference ..read more

Now that we are a few weeks into school and things are starting to come together, I want to share a few functional classroom jobs that have been added to our classroom this year! I have always had classroom jobs but this year I have added a few new ones to the list since I am now working with students from Kindergarten to Fifth grade all day versus preschool students half of a day.  (To see previous posts regarding my preschool jobs click these links: Arrival Jobs, Snack Jobs) As Dr. Becky Bailey shares through Conscious Discipline, it is important that students have jobs that cont ..read more

Check out these functional tasks that are so simple and cheap to make, using old containers around the house (or classroom)! TASK ONE: A Squeeze Jelly Fine Motor Sort Could be used as a sorting and fine motor task or a simple fine motor task.  It is just scrap pieces of felt that need to be fed through the lid using a pincer grasp.   TASK TWO: A Sandwich Assembly Task Perfect for pretend play in a dramatic play center for younger students or for practical practice of making sandwiches in a life skills class.  I used scrap pieces of felt and old sandwich containers but ..read more