Easy Interactive Books

My friend Bev came up with this brilliant idea years ago.  I didn't need it for a number of years, but last year I had several students who benefitted from having more interaction during their story time.

We simply took an inexpensive paperback book and cut it apart.  Next we ran the pages through the laminator.  We then took a targeted vocabulary word from each page and created a Boardmaker document with a picture. Next we used the hole punch binding tool that we have in our teacher workroom to bind the book back together.  Finally, we used velcro dots to make each page interactive.

This has been a great way for us to create inexpensive interactive books for circle time.

Journals for Pre-K

Last year I started looking for ideas on Pinterest about journaling with preschoolers.  I came across a few pins that helped me get started:

Ten Tips for Keeping a Journal in Preschool

Pre-School Journaling

J is for Journal


After reading about how others started, organized and maintained their journals; I started making the decisions about how I would use the journals in my classroom.

I chose to use simple black and white composition books for our journals.  I used a name label sticker on the front of each child's journal and also made one for myself.

My class typically is most successful when I model expectations for them before they attempt a structured task like this.  Before the kids ever used their journal, I had all of the journals prepped and in a basket and I modeled drawing a picture in my journal.  Since most of the students in my class have language impairments, I wanted the focus of our journals based on increasing their communication skills.  After I drew my picture, I talked about it.  I labeled the picture, told the class a sentence about my picture.  We did this a few times, using the word journal and modeling how to draw, turn pages, choose the next page, etc.  The first time I passed out their journals at circle time, all we did was look at the journal and turn the blank pages.

We used our journals in a small group, structured center with adult support at first.  After all of the students started to understand the purpose and became more proficient at drawing their pictures, I would also put them out for a table activity or "morning work" first thing in the morning in a large group.

Since my goal was to help increase communication, every time the students worked in their journal, they talked to an adult (me, my assistant, a volunteer) about it and we wrote their exact words on the paper.  Through this, we also had ongoing documentation showing how their language skills improved over time.  You can see the length of utterance increases, use of age appropriate vocabulary, use of pronouns and use of action words.  This became a great way for  me to show parents what language skill I might be working on with a child and how they could help.

I also found that our science center was a great inspiration spot for lots of writing and observation.

Here are some photos of some of  our journal work:

And here are some from a different student:

Bubbles and Problem Solving

I have 2 year old twin nephews.  They both love bubbles right now and have a lawn mower bubble maker as well as several no-spill bubble containers.  We ran out of re-fill bubbles one day when I was watching them and one of the boys really wanted his lawn mower to have more bubbles.

He kept saying "more bubbles?"  I had to tell him "bubbles all gone.  no more."  He cried (he is 2) and then was able to be redirected to his train for a bit and then went back to the bubbles.

The next thing I knew, he was attempting to fill his lawn mower with the no-spill container.  He knew he had bubbles left in the no spill container and he was doing his best to get them where he wanted them.  I thought that was pretty good thinking and problem solving for a 2 year old! (even if it didn't work.....I loved the process of his thinking.)

(The little guy in the picture has delays in the communication and social/personal domains.  So fun to see his strengths clearly evident, too!)

Pre-K Again

As this school year draws to a close, our principal has sent out our "most likely" assignments for next year.  She calls them "most likely" because, as we all know, things can change over the summer.  If the needs of our students change, then staff assignments sometimes have to change too.

My "most likely" assignment for next year is back with the pre-k special needs population.  I'm ready for a change again, but I LOVE my school, so I didn't want to change that!  One of our pre-k teachers retired this May, so an opening came up at our school.  I love the language development and developmental play aspects of pre-k, so I"m excited.

I've started culling through some of my old pre-k files and rediscovered a blog from a pre-k teacher, Christi Seward in Cobb County.

She hasn't posted in a few years, so perhaps her teaching assignment changed or something else in her life changed, but she has a WONDERFUL collection of picture books with essential vocabulary and comprehension questions that she discusses.  She also has created many power points to support her lessons.

One of the books she highlights is "Bear Wants More" by Karma Wilson.

In addition to Christi's resources, there is also a YouTube read aloud with the book, too.  (This version is really sweet.  A boy received this as a birthday present and his family recorded him reading it out loud for the person who gave him the book.)

 

This has been a busy year and I haven't completed too many posts, but hopefully that will change this next year coming up!

Dog's Colorful Day

My niece is expecting her first baby! Yay! So what's an aunt to do? Of course, I am cyber-stalking her "future mommy" page on Pinterest. I was so excited to see her pin and re-pin many felt board and felt play activities. So when it was decided that instead of giving a card at her baby shower, we would give her a children's book; I had to start thinking about which felt board books I loved so I could send her some felt play along with my book. One of my favorites is "Dog's Colorful Day" by Emma Dodd.

Dog has some very exciting, messy and colorful adventures throughout the day. The readers are encouraged to count and describe the spots that start to appear on dog's fur as the evidence of his adventures. For example, dog starts off with one black spot on his left ear, but after passing the painted door he now has two spots. One black spot on his left ear and one blue spot from the paint. The adventures continue throughout Dog's day.

My preschoolers loved interacting with this book with a felt board activity I made. As we read the book, the children would sequence the item that caused the spot on Dog at the top of my felt board in left to right progression. We would also add the appropriate spot to dog. At the end of the story, we put dog in the bath to get clean and then finally in his bed. This is a lesson the kids wanted repeated time and time again. They loved playing with the colors and the sequence of the story through the felt pieces.


Consequently, I got to have lots of conversations about colors, numbers and retelling stories through play. Isn't that the best?


 Photo credit:http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://heightslibrary.org/wordpress/explorastory/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/dogs-colorful-day.jpg&imgrefurl=http://heightslibrary.org/wordpress/explorastory/?attachment_id%3D887&h=648&w=520&sz=47&tbnid=FZAWTeo3zYglYM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=72&zoom=1&usg=__hMqMXyP36XSG5ETzjcMhWGHbaYo=&docid=xxOX9rSEuAhdaM&sa=X&ei=c1toUuvDIoq-kQeb2IGgAQ&ved=0CDsQ9QEwAQ

Re-visiting PreK Favorites

I've had a few comments recently about lessons for pre-schoolers.

If you've been reading for awhile, you know that when I started this blog I was teaching a self-contained class for preschoolers with varying exceptionalities.  You may want to explore some of the older posts where I posted a lot of what I was doing at the time.  Since I'm now thinking and problem solving for older students, I'm posting more about them!  But the oldies and goodies are still here.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Fall Festival

Hot Pumpkin

Post-It Graphs

I'm Thinking of a Word

Block Play

Valentine's Activity: Hearts Everywhere

If you are in any way similar to me in how you plan lessons for activities you've seen online, you need some time to read about the idea, think about how you would use it with your group, prepare your materials and then implement it.  One of the teacher's on my team this year says he likes to let concepts have a chance to "marinate."  We've all adopted his lingo.  We like to let kids have the chance to have repeated exposure to concepts, but sometimes we also need some marinating time for ourselves. 

In an effort to give everyone some time to "marinate" the following ideas, I'm sending them out early (or really late considering I took the pictures last February!)

For my pre-schoolers that I've had in the past, this lesson focused on the positional concept "on" as well as identification of common objects.

I started with the interactive book, "Hearts Everywhere",  from the Jefferson Parish AAC link.  I would read the book to my class using the felt board and laminated hearts.  On each page, the students would take turns placing the heart "on" the object identified in the book.

After introducing the book and the vocabulary, the next day before the children came in the classroom, my assistant and I placed construction paper hearts all over the classroom.  During circle time, I would call a few students at a time to go "look for a red heart" and bring it back to the carpet.  When they brought their heart back, I would ask them where they found their heart.  Once they answered the question, we would place it on our chart and I would call the next group of children to go look. 

TIP:  If you are working with pre-school age children, be sure to write on the heart the location that you placed it.  For example, "on the fish tank."  When you have several children looking at the same time, it's easy to miss who picked one up from specific locations.  If you don't have several children looking at the same time, the waiting period gets to be too long for little ones.  And if you have students at levels similar to the students I have taught, when you ask the question, "Where was your heart?" you will inevitable get the answer "over there" a few times.  You want to be sure you can accurately prompt them to answer the question using the positional word "on" and the correct common object where it was.

I love activities that get students actively engaged.  These types of scavenger hunts always produce smiles, laughter and excitement.

Because of that I'm trying to think of a way I can adapt the activity to be appropriate for my current third graders.

I think I will connect it to our writer's workshop lessons.  We have been working on using more descriptive phrases in our paragraphs.  I am going to  place many hearts all over the room with their labels.  Have the students put their heads down with their eyes closed and give each student 10 or 15 seconds (one at a time) to go get a heart from somewhere in the room.  After they collect their hearts, they will describe where they found the heart, but they are not allowed to name the object.  Then they will read their paragraphs to their classmates who will need to guess where the heart was originally.

I'll have to let you know how it goes!  I'd love to see other ideas on how to use a scavenger hunt type activity to support academic goals for older students.  Please post your ideas in the comments section.

Play based writing

I have found a lovely, photo based blog entry on supporting writing skills through a play based curriculum.

Check it out. Jenny's preschool classroom writing experiences (indoors and outdoors) are fantastic!

Let the Children Play

My Dining Room.....

Does this look familiar to anyone? I bet I'm not the only one!

This is what my dining room has looked like for the past two weeks. A few things have contributed to this disaster. I boxed up materials I would need for ESY for myself and let 2 other friends borrow materials for their ESY classes, too. I'm moving to a new elementary school in the fall and although ESY has ended, now I need to wait a little bit longer to give the custodians a chance to do their "deep clean" on my new room.

Thank goodness I have an understanding husband and a table in our breakast nook!