Transportation and Cookie Sheets

Once again, I have to say that a unit study of "Transportation" is rich with ideas - both online, in your own toy box, and in the library. I just wanted to share one nifty idea pinched from Darci, one of our preK teachers. What I have here is a cookie sheet from the thrift store (with a background drawn with Sharpie markers), pictures of various vehicles, cut and laminated, double-faced tape, and a sheet of magnet. A great sorting activity!

Pizza!

Back to school and back to blogging! It always takes me a few weeks to 're-calibrate' as I leave summer vacation behind.

Everyone loves pizza and there are loads of activities to do with a pizza unit. Pictured above are 2 of my favorites. One is a math pizza puzzle - the kids assemble it as they make responses. It is such a simple thing, but kids love it! The other activity, Pizza Plate, works well for language or artic responses. I cut out rough - very rough, one might even say abstract - representations of pizza toppings from construction paper. Then I have the kids use red and brown crayons to put "sauce" and "crust" on the "dough". Then they request and glue various toppings. I also have a rolling pin they use to flatten the paper plate (roll the dough) before coloring.

I always like to have some literature tie-in and depending on the age of my group, I use one of the following books:


Pete's a Pizza by William Steig This is especially good for preK because they love to be 'rolled' like Pete.

The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza)by
Philemon Sturges

Curious George and the Pizza

Finally, I love to make little English muffin pizzas with my special ed preK class. We have a toaster oven in the class and I just use English muffins, sauce and preshredded mozzarella cheese. I have a Tech Talk set up for requesting ingredients.

If you have any other great pizza ideas, please leave a comment!

Everybody Loves Animals - Part 1

I suppose we all have tons of activities about animals. Please feel free to post your favorites in the comments. I'm hoping to post several of my very best over the next month.



This was a simple lesson I did with my special ed prek. First, we put all the puzzles together and talked a bit/asked questions about each one. Then I pulled the battery-operated yipping dog from my bag (very high interest as you can imagine!). The kids each practiced saying/touching the words on the sentence strip.

Clothing Unit Part I

There is SO much that can be done with a Clothing Unit! Of course, there are many books, such as "Jesse Bear, What will you wear?" and "The Jacket I wear in the Snow". I'll try to make a book list in my next post on Clothing. I like to do my clothing unit in January, and tie in seasonal clothing as well.

There are hundreds of worksheets and activities I could post, but this clothesline activity is always popular. My students will play this again and again - I get bored long before they do.

I start by 'washing' the clothes in my 'washing machine' (the clothes are in a decorated folder and we just shake them around). Then we go through hanging and unhanging each item. For artic kids, they say target sounds before choosing what they want to hang.

For language, it varies by goals. Here are some things I've done:
-make a riddle for each item
-the student describes what they want and I guess
-students compose a sentence about the clothing or when it is worn
-ask a 'wh' question such as "when do we wear pajamas".

For some of my students, it is quite a fine motor workout as well - clothes pins are pretty tricky for prek!

I made my clothes out of construction paper and laminated them. It might also be fun to go to a thrift store and get REAL baby/toddler clothes to hang. If you'd like to try printing out your own, I've scanned mine in this ZIP file - CLICK HERE FOR CLOTHES.

Here is the TechTalk grid I made for this unit - mostly used as a matching activity.






Please leave a comment if you have other ideas for using clothes for unit activities.

First Special Education PreK Lesson of the Year

Let me start off by stating that I am not employed by Mayer-Johnson nor do I benefit from any sales of their products (unless you buy through my Amazon link, but they are often out of stock of MJ stuff). I do love many of the MJ items, especially Boardmaker; I'll be blogging about that in future posts.


Today I brought 2 activities into my special ed prek class for our Back to School opening lesson. First we read the MJ book "Let's get Ready for School" which is sung more than read (try singing "Now it's time to put on our socks and shoes" to the tune of "This is the way we wash our clothes"!). Each page has a velcro item to manipulate. I love velcro as you will see. As we go through the book, I ask questions (depending on each child's level) such as "What is a bed for?" or "Where do we brush our teeth?". Each child gets a turn to groom the little fellow and they especially love it when I use the brush, etc, on them!



After the bus comes and takes the guy to school, I bring out my closed backpack and we begin to talk about what's inside. They are completely fascinated by this. I talk about how in my backpack are some silly things that we don't bring to school, and some things that ARE for school. Of course, all the things, logically, could be part of a school day at some point, especially in preK, but I tactfully evade this point. They absolutely love to reach in a pull things out, and of course the first to come out are the fun, non-school ones. We talk a lot about each one and pass them around...the rock is heavy, the spatula is used in the kitchen (each child's hand is a pretend pancake which I then "flip"), the big sock goes on your feet, etc. I use lots of questions about function and location. I also ask a lot of yes/no questions, which are great for the non-verbal kids (Does the sock go on your hand??) as well as for getting a laugh. And naturally, any kids working on artic repeat sounds, words, and/or sentences. Then we make a big deal of putting all the items back IN the backpack. This takes about 30 mins and if there is a little time leftover we sing a song (Like "Open Shut Them").