end of unit progress report

At the end of each unit, I gather all of my student data. For each student I fill out this data form I created. I have gotten great feedback from parents saying they love these reports. They like seeing what their student was learning and how they performed. This form is very straight forward and super simple to understand!

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spring sensory bin

Even though this is our last week before our vacation, I wanted to give the kids a new sensory bin to play in. This bin fit in perfectly with our geography unit we just finished up (land), and our new season~ Spring! In the bin are plastic flowers, plastic gardening tools, flower bulbs, plastic creatures that live in the ground, pinwheels, and dirt as the base. Before letting them have it, I taught them what each object was and how to use it. Once they demonstrated that they understood, I placed the sensory bin into the sensory center. The kids loved pretending playing in the garden!

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Vacation

I've gotten questions as to why I'm teaching February's ULS unit in March.  So, I figured I would go ahead and let my blog readers know why this is!

I teach in a very large county that has adopted a decent portion of it's school to follow a year round calendar.  Basically, I teach for 9 weeks and am off for 3 weeks.  I have been in this type of calendar for 4 years now, and LOVE it!  It was tough at first, but now I couldn't imagine going back to a traditional calendar. 

So, sometimes I'm ahead a month, behind a month, or skipped a month.  I'm trying really hard to teach the same unit that you are currently in so you can actually utilize the resources that I'm posting about :) 

This Friday is the last day of my 9 weeks, and I'll be on vacation starting on Monday, April 4th.  I am working on setting up posts to fill my blog while I'm on vacation.  My posts will be scaled down to 2-3 postings, but when I return on Monday, April 25th, I will be back to posting 5 days a week.  I'm starting with my April unit, so I'll be a little behind you.

If you are coming up on your Spring Break, I hope you have a very nice relaxing vacation and enjoy every minute of it. If you already had your vacation, I hope you are coming back nice and relaxed!

NCI ~ prevention, core, core+

No posts from my classroom today, sorry!  Today, I spent the day in a workshop getting my yearly certification for a program called NCI (north carolina interventions).  The training website is here: http://www.ncdhhs.gov/mhddsas/training/nci.htm

It is a program that aims to provide strategies for:

Prevention

• Building positive relationships.
• Decision making and problem solving.
• Assessing risk for escalating behavior.
• Early crisis intervention.

Core:

• Prevention plus,
• Non-restraining blocks and releases

Core+

• Core plus,
• Approved optional restraining physical techniques such as therapeutic holds, carries and techniques for special populations.*

The county I teach in, is one of the only counties in the state to offer this training to their low incidence teachers.  It is an amazing training and I highly recommend attending something similiar to this in the state that you live in. 

Hope everyone had a great Monday!

storing units when finished

There are a thousand ways to store units, and I'm showing you just one. This particular method is working well for me, but who is to say I won't find a better method down the road. I take each lesson and all of its components and place them into a labeled 1 gallon size ziploc bag. I then place all of the bags into a copy paper box (you can't beat free!!). I then place all of the extra tasks and extension lessons I made into the box. The outside of the box is labeled with the month, unit number, grade band, and a brief description of what the unit is. I place these on a shelf with the words facing out. I would love to hear of other storage methods!

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comprehension question set up

This lesson is one that is set up to look like a news article. There are 2 levels of reading and 3 levels of comprehension questions. I focus on level 1 and 2 of the questions. To make level 1 questions more organized, I laminate the questions, answers, and a piece of cardstock. I take the questions and the piece of cardstock and bind the 2 together into book like form. I then take the answer pieces and velcro them to the empty space of the cardstock. This keeps the pieces together and organized. It also allows me to make this an independent reading task once I have taught the lesson several times.

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data collection

I have created a data template to use with each unit of study. Every month Unique has the same type of activity for a certain lesson. So for each month you know that lesson 1 will be an adapted reader and lesson 2 will be read and answer. At the start of a unit, I load in the description of each lesson and print off for each student. As I teach the lessons, I pull out that data sheet and fill in the date and any comments about how the lesson went for that particular child. At the end of the unit, I compare their post unit test with the data sheet. I can tell from my data sheet why the student didn't pass a particular item because I have all their data on that sheet. This helps me with planning workstation tasks, extension activities and with writing my IEP objectives and goals. After the unit, I place their data sheet into their individual notebooks.

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lucky patterns

The last St. Patrick's day extension activity the students worked on was patterns. I photographed different patterns using foam St.Patrick's day beads. I laminated the pattern strips and hole punched the corner and added a ring to keep the patterns together. The bag was purchased for a dollar at a office supply store and the vinyl words and clover were made using my personal cutting machine. The students loved this activity!

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St. Patrick sensory bin

Our sensory bin this week is themed for St. Patrick's day. The first picture shows the items going into the tub. We had: a small clay pot painted black, foam St. Patrick's day beads, foam covers, gold coins, and plastic jewel shamrocks. The second picture is the bin assembled.

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workstation task~ initial consonant match

Using a royalty free graphics site, I found clipart images that had the same beginning consonant sounds that we are learning in our current unit. Students take a vis-a-vi marker and draw a line to the letter that matches the beginning letter of that picture. It is stored in their workstation in a basket with the marker and the picture cards.

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extension activity ~ lesson 18 money

As an extension to our units money lesson, I created a "lucky change" activity. One set of shamrocks has images of coins and the other has the written money amount.
1.) One level of play is for the student to match play money coins to the coin images on the shamrocks.
2.) Another way to play is to match the coin shamrock to the written amount shamrock.
3.) A higher level of play would be to give the student the written amount shamrock and find the coin shamrock to match or count out play money to match the written amount.
I'm sure there are many more ways to play, but these are the 3 basic ways we practiced with.

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extension activity~ lesson 25

This week is St.Patrick's day and we are incorporating that holiday into our lessons. We are finishing up our geography unit, and working on our last couple of lessons before doing our end of unit testing. The original lesson (lesson 25) was about pairing up big and little pictures. So to extend this lesson and incorporate the current holiday, I made a sort board lesson. Students are to take the foam 4 leaf covers and put them into the correct column on the sort board. To store this activity, I put the pieces into a baggie, laminate the sort board, and laminate a large envelope for the pieces to be kept in.

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organizing lessons for teacher time

I am in love with crates. They do a great job with containing my teaching materials. Each day I have a 1:1 teaching time with each student. I set up my lessons in this crate on Friday afternoon. I look in my lesson plans for the following week and load those lessons and extension activities into what day of the week I plan on teaching them. I also have a space to hold my data sheets, adapted reader books and an emergency sub plan binder. I really have settled into organizing my lessons this way and it surely has paid off when I get sick or hit a deer with my car (no fun, that really happened to me this week). My sub is able to pull that days folder and carry on as planned.

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picture sort

Sorting pictures of land and water. I have a graphics website that I utilized for these images. I inserted the pictures into word and used the textbox tool to write what the picture was. I then created a simple 2 column sort in word. Laminate for durability. As each picture was presented, we would describe what we see and place the picture into that column.

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sensory bin~ geography

One of my rotations in my class is sensory table. Each week (or every 2 weeks) I change out the sensory bin. This week we used a water bin to correspond with our geography unit. Inside the bin you will find: plastic fish, water quarters, boat, two pouring cups, and some beads and buttons at the bottom. My kids absolutely loved their bin this week. I would not put the small objects in the bin if you have students that put things in their mouth.

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incorporating fine motor skills

To incorporate fine motor skills into our geography unit I utilized my boardmaker cd (this can be done in Microsoft word also). I found pictures of land and water and took the line tool and created a cut line up to the picture. We worked on the land page first. With each line, they had to say what image it led to. After finishing the land page we went onto the water page. Super simple activity to incorporate the unit vocabulary while practicing the all important fine motor skill.

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lesson with playdoh

Today we are working with playdoh to prepare for our units cooking lesson. The cooking lesson calls for the student to tear biscuits in half. To prepare for this lesson, we are pretending to make and tear biscuits in half. I make my own playdoh, and have themed this playdoh for St. Patrick's day. The students take a chunk out of the container and pat it out into a nice thin layer. They then take one of the circle cookie cutters and make a pretend biscuit. After they have made their biscuits, they tear them in half. The stack of fraction cards came from a website called Sparklebox. I will reuse this playdoh next week with some St. Patricks's day vocabulary playdoh cards. Happy playdoh playing!

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writing modification

Just wanted to share a quick writing modification. When you have a child that writes very big, give them some visual support. With a highlighter, make letter blocks for them to write in. You will notice in line A how large the writing was without the support. Lines B and C are with the visual support.

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writing lesson

Today we worked on a writing lesson. The original lesson came with the lesson plan and the write a story template. There was a couple of things I did to modify this lesson. First I took each fill in the blank sentence and gave it a letter. Then I took the corresponding picture choices for each sentence and put velcro on them on the yellow laminate cardstock. As you can tell the picture choices corresponded with the writing template. After the child read their sentence, they would choose which picture they wanted ( from the corresponding letter) and place onto the template. When finished I set up a hand writing without tears paper. I wrote the title and first sentence, and the student finished the paper by writing sentences A B C that they had completed. When finished they read me their story. If your student is more of a level 1 student you could place paper copies in front of them and just cut and paste their answers into the blanks.

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working with 1/2

This unit we are covering the fraction 1/2. This activity has the students pouring rainbow rice into cups. They are to fill the cup 1/2 way. The red line on the cup is there for visual support. Eventually the red line will go away and they will fill the cup without the visual support. This also helps the student with their ability to pour items into another container.

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cooking with 1/2

This unit focuses on the fraction 1/2 and the term halfway. We did a cooking lesson with this terminology. We made muffins using 1/2 cup milk and filling the muffin tin cups 1/2 halfway. This activity is filed under YUMMY!

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HFW teaching strategy

To practice our high frequency word lists for the unit, I create spelling tiles with a picture support. Letter tiles are sorted into a plastic container and word cards are placed in front of the student one at a time. Student spells with the tiles and then repeats the word. Once correct, the next card is presented.

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singular and plural work task

My students consistently struggle with reading word endings. They make words plural when they are singular and singular when they are plural. Here is a work task where they practice sorting pictures that show one or more then one. The clipart that I pulled corresponds with the beginning letter sounds that the current unit focuses on.

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pre unit check point

After assessing reading passages, I move into assessing the unit checkpoint. This is to be done before teaching the unit and after teaching the unit so you can see if the student grew in the stead being assessed. In the picture you see everything needed to complete this assessment. I laminate the student question pages for durability. I put my checkpoint questions are kept in a folder. My data sheets ate kept in my clipboard. Once they finish pre unit assessments, I enter the data into ULS system. I then take the hard copy and file into the individual student data notebook.
Happy teaching!

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