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:

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

Easy Adaptable Books

Patrick at Teaching All Students has a great description about how to make an easy adaptable book for your students. Check it out.

Scatman Video about Stuttering

Another video that my husband found and forwarded to me.......





Here are some other links and information about John Scatman.

Wikipedia Information

Lyrics posted on the Stuttering Forum

Interview script