Living and Learning

Moving to Blogger...

I'm moving my teaching blog over to blogger.  I feel like its taking a new path and I kind of wanted to mark that in a concrete manner.  I do plan to keep my personal blog (Red Lights) here and am hoping to start it up again on Mikey's 12th birthday (January 3) doing a "year in his life" project.

Please come on over to my new blog: Eliminating the Box.  My big regret in this is that Blogger doesn't have a tool to move everything over so I'm going to end up losing the comments that I have here :(.

Brainstorming: Back to School Bulletin Board and Project

I'm brainstorming a bit on our back-to-school project and bulletin board.  I like to do something that has the students make a poster or booklet about themselves so that we can put them on display in the hallway. Our students love making these and the others in the school love reading them. This is always the most interacted with board in our school.

This year I want to stick with the movie theme.  My thought is that the board will mostly be set up before students arrive.  The title of the board will be "Introducing the Stars of L.A.P."  There will be stars and lights and clapboards...etc.  Each student will have a picture of themselves and their names with stars to highlight.  Somewhere on the board, I will also have the "Production Team" (staff) but that will be smaller - probably infused on a roll of film.

I am also going to put up a poster advertising "Living and Learning Biographies" magazine.

For the first couple of weeks, students will put together a biography magazine about themselves and these will eventually get attached to the bulletin board for others to take a look at :).

Here is an outline of the biography magazine:

Title Page: I am working on a designing a cover that will be the same for everyone except that the feature topic for the magazine will be that person with a picture of that person on the front of the magazine.  I'm going to use this site to make the cover so it looks like a real magazine: http://bighugelabs.com/magazine.php

Table of Contents: Because the amount of pages will not be the same in each student's book, I will make a template of all the sections and then the pages will get filled as the magazine is completed.

Introducing Student Name: This section will just be a general fill in of biographical information such as full name, birthday, eye color, hair color, height...etc.

A Peak in ---'s Scrapbook: This is meant to a section that is like a scrapbook and has pictures of the student from birth through to now.

Friends and Family: Just a section to highlight friends and family.

Love It or Leave It: A place to highlight things the student likes, their hobbies  and/or their interests as well as the things they just don't really like. 

Check This Out!: This is meant to a place to put information about the student including interests, hobbies, talents, things that make them unique, neat things that have happened in their lives...etc.

I Can!: Our school is big on teaching with "I Can" statements and I use them in the room for tasks that we are doing. I like to also focus students this way in thinking about all the things that they can do.  Some of this will refer to things they have learned to do in the past in our classroom.

The Last Word: Some comments from others about this person.  I will have parents, family, friends, staff...etc. write notes and these will be published.

I should have the boardmaker file to be used for this done in the next day or two and I will post it then :).

PCI Environmental Print: My First Reactions Are Positive!

I have not yet had a chance to use these materials with my students but have spent a bit of time in the past week since it was delivered taking a look at it and I'm excited to try it out in our room.  I think it will work great for several of our students and also feel confident that I could use it for the whole class if that is the way I wanted to use it.  Right now I'm looking at using it with 4 students over the next year or so. 

I will know more about it as I start to use it but right now some of the things that I'm really like about it include:

Characters in the stories are teenagers or young adults (in assisted work placements).  Love this as the students I'm using it with are also teenagers or young adults.  It is hard to find print material that is this basic in content that is also age appropriate.

Non-verbal response activities: the curriculum includes a response matt (that would be easy enough to make as it just has "yes", "no" and "I don't know" on it but all the same its nice to already have it) and response cards for questions.  So, for example when you ask the question "What was the story about?" there are response cards and you can grab out two of them that have someone bowling and someone swimming on and the student would indicate which one the answer is.  Love this as so many of my students are non-verbal and this cuts down on the time that I have to spend making response cards.

The content is applicable to the "real world".  When working on things like comprehension questions you are also working on community safety awareness, functional vocabulary, community concepts...etc.  It is easy to reference this stuff back to my student's life.

There are many opportunities for community outings worked in to the curriculum as one of the lessons is to go out in to the community and find thes signs.  I like that the signs are grouped in a way that you would be able to find the group of signs in one location. 

I like the way of the concept of "title", "main idea", "main character" and "location" are worked in.  The features of the main character could be a bit more varied but the concept is there.

Some of my initial thoughts on things that I would like to see or things that I'm concerned about include:

"Walk" and "Don't Walk" on traffic lights are not included.  I understand this is the first level of the curriculum but I would rank these signs as some of the first ones that should be taught.  The concept of a traffic light is not even addressed in regards to red meaning stop, green meaning go...etc. 

It would be nice to have some sort of switch adapted materials to go along with this curriculum - a switch activated book, a power point, some kind of switch activated response program...etc.

Some of the signs are signs that will not always be the same in the same location (please wait to be seated for example) and there could be  a level of confusion there.  I will be taking pictures of a variety of similar signs to show students that these can be different.  I have not yet looked ahead enough to see if the curriculum addresses this or not.  They may already have it covered.

Wednesday's Weekly Comments

Anybody else curious? on SMD Teacher blog: I have been looking at this curriculum for a while now and am really hoping that someone who has tried it with our population will respond.

Dish drying... on Teaching Learners With Multiple Special Needs blog: Always great to see ways that other people are using switches as you can never have too many ideas for switch use :).

Monday's Motivation: The Fun Theory

One of my first experiences with teaching was when I was a teenager working for the summer as a lifeguard.  I was assigned to teach swim lessons and had to figure out how to teach young children to float.  Floating is an interest "skill" to teach as it is not really a "skill" at all because a child will pretty much naturally float as soon as they become comfortable in the water.  It was the first time I came face to face with the importance of environment and approach when teaching.  I had to set up an environment where the child felt safe and encouraged and then suddenly they were floating!  Fear and negativity had no place in the world of learning to swim.

I've carried this lesson with me through my years of teaching and have been amazed over and over again what students can accomplish when you assume competence and ensure feelings of belonging, love and aonfidence. 

This week I stumbled upon the website "The Fun Theory" and it reminded me again of how important what we do as educators in regards to setting up our classrooms and learning activities is.  I'm posting one of my favorite videos from this site.  There are many more worth checking out :).

New Money Materials that I'm Working On(Note: Canadian Content)

I am working with a couple of my students on coming up with a systematic way to display money using pennies, dimes and loonies (the Canadian version of a dollar bill).  I started putting together some worksheets for this based on color coding the numbers in a dollar amount (up to $9.99) using brown (pennies), silver (dimes) and gold (loonies). 

This is a work in progress and I will probably make some changes but wanted to share the materials that I've put together so far in case others can see a need for it in their classrooms.  Note that if you are in the states you will have to make modifications as the pictures of the coins are Canadian coins and the color coding is based on the color of Canadian money.

Skills that I am looking at developing over the long term:

Reading dollar amounts to $9.99. 

Finding and reading prices in flyers, at stores and on signs.

Recognizing and stating the value of pennies, dimes and loonies.

Displaying money amounts up to $9.99 using pennies, dimes and loonies and color-coded visuals.

It is going to be a process but I'm feeling confident that these two students will get this skill down and over time I'm hoping that the color coded visuals can be phased out.

Stay tuned for more sharing, reflecting and expanding on this program!

The following is a list of some of the skills that students will need to either have or develop as we go along.  I'm putting them here as a reminder to myself to focus on these things as we work through the program.  I have developed a few materials as well.  These are activities that we can do at the same time as we work through the list of activities listed below this.

Naming and Stating Values of Pennies, Dimes and Loonies

Naming and Stating Values of Pennies, Dimes and Loonies Activities

Work with a set of real pennies, dimes and loonies - find all of each type of coin, go through the coins and say the name or value, sort the coins...etc.

Finding Prices

Locate prices when doing community shopping trips (grocery store, dollar store...etc.).

Bring flyers and advertisements in to the classroom and have studnet point to prices.

Locate price displays when doing community trips to places that display their prices (swimming, bowling, fast food places...etc.).

Identifying Dollar Sign, Cent Sign and Decimal Sign

Pointing to these in all of the practical places stated above. 

Circle Dollar, Cent and Decimal Sign Worksheets

Reading Prices up $9.99 (in the form nine dollars and ninety-nine cents)

Reading Money Values to $9.99 Cards

Read prices in all the practical places outlined in the above section

Reading Numbers 1 through 99

Break down to reading numbers 1 through 9, reading numbers 10, 20... 90 and then reading the numbers 1 through 99

Number Cards 0-100

Here are the materials that I've put together so far.  I am working on color printing all of these and laminating them so that they can be reused (as we need the color component for what I'm planning to do with this program).

Identifying and Sorting Penny Activities: Activities to ensure that students can pick pennies out of a group of coins.  Activities are also set up to start to reinforce the color matching between pennies and "brown" as this will be a concept that is carried throughout these worksheets.  Note that although there are dimes and loonies in these activities, the focus should be on the pennies and reinforcing their name and value.

Penny Cards (cent sign): Simple activity cards where the student circles the value displayed on the card or where they write in the value of coins on the card. Note that these cards display pennies only. I have also included zero values as I have one of my students who needs reinforcement on the concept of zero.

Penny Cards (dollar signs): Same activity as the one above but this one has dollar signs instead of cent signs. Can focus on conversion between dollar and cent signs and also on the color coding aspect of the program.

Displaying Penny Amounts (0 to 9 cents with dollar and cent sign): The students will use real pennies to display amounts and to read the amounts - working with the cent and dollar sign when doing so.

Cross Out Worksheets - Pennies Only (0 to 9 cents): Worksheets where students go through and cross out a given amount of money (using only pennies and cent sign). Work on reading money amounts at the same time.

Cross Out Worksheets - Pennies Only ($0.00 to $0.09): Worksheet where students go through and cross out a given amount of money (using only pennies and the dollar sign).  Work on reading money amounts at the same time.  Focus on the fact that we are working with pennies therefore we need to find the brown number (note that there are other colored numbers that we will deal with later).

Identifying and Sorting Dimes Activities: Similar actitivies to what was done with pennies but this time associating the color silve with dimes (can use grey instead of silver if it makes more sense).  Note that I've also included extra reinforcement of finding pennies concept.

Dime Cards (cent sign): Similar concept to penny cards but builds in a step to get the concept of counting by tens.  These cards have only dimes on them.

Dime cards (dollar sign): Again, similar concept to what was done with pennies - moving from cent sign to dollar sign to aid in making links to equivalent amounts and to reinforce color coding concepts (counting the silver/grey number).

Display Dime Amounts (0, 10, 20... 90 with dollar and cent signs): Following the same pattern as with the pennies but use all dimes to complete this activity.

Cross Out Worksheets - Dimes Only (0, 10, 20... 90 cents)

Cross Out Worksheet - Dimes Only ($0.00, $0.10... $0.90)

Cross Out Worksheets - Pennies and Dimes (0, 10, 20... 90 cents)

Cross Out Worksheets - Pennies and Dimes ($0.00, $0.10... $0.90)

Cross Out Worksheets - Pennies and Dimes (0 to 9 cents)

Cross Out Worksheets - Pennies and Dimes ($0.00 to $0.09)

Penny and Dime Cards (00 cents to 99 cents)

Display Penny and Dime Amounts (00 cents to 99 cents)

Penny and Dime Cards ($0.00 to $0.99)

Diplay Penny and Dime Amounts ($0.00 to $0.99)

Cross Out Worksheets - Pennies and Dimes (0 to 99 cents)

Cross Out Worksheets - Penniesa nd Dimes ($0.00 to $0.99)

Identifying and Sorting Loonies Activities

Loonie Cards (dollar sign only)

Display Dollar Amounts ($0.00 to $9.00 - dollar sign only)

Cross Out Worksheets - Loonies Only (dollar sign)

Loonie and Dime Cards (dollar sign)

Display Loonie and Dime Amounts (dollar sign)

Cross Out Worksheets - Loonies and Dimes (dollar sign)

Loonie and Penny Cards (dollar sign)

Display Loonie and Penny Amounts (dollar sign)

Cross Out Worksheet - Loonies and Pennies (dollar sign)

Loonie, Dime and Penny Cards (dollar sign)

Display Loonie, Dime and Penny Amounts (dollar sign)

Cross Out Worksheets - Loonie, Dimes and Pennies (dollar sign)  ~coming soon~

Naming Canadian Coins and Bills: A simple tracing worksheet that gives the names and values of Canadian currency up to and including the $20 bill.  I've put this worksheet here but I will not use it until after I do something similar to what is outlined above with the 10 dollar bill.  We will then get in to working with nickels, quarters, toonies and 5 and 20 dollar bills.

Changes...

I have been going through a period of struggle/growth recently as it has become evident to me that it is time to make some big changes to how our classroom is run.  I have really seen the need to establish more consistency in the programming of the students and therefore have made some big plans to make this happen.

In the past I have rotated our staff through all of the students and have worked myself in to this rotation to ensure that the students are pretty much working 1 to 1 all day long.  It has become evident to me that I can no longer work with a student all day and coordinate everyone's program and ensure consistency in staff approach when they are rotating to new students.  I have decided to take myself out of the rotation and just do "coordination" types of tasks during the day.  I will still work with students as needed.  The other thing that I've thought a lot about for next year is to break the students in to two groups and have staff only rotate through 4 or 5 students instead of rotating through 8 or 9 as that will help with the consistency end of things.  Rotating staff is still important to me.  Its just that I need to rethink the best way to do it in regards to our students.  I'm also seeing that we have two different sets of needs in our classroom and am feeling like we may need to specialize staff in to those two areas as the crossover becomes a bit of a exercise in major changes to approach. 

The physcial lay out of our classroom is also evolving.  One third of our class now falls on the autism spectrum and I'm seeing a real need to eliminate sensory input and to more clearly define spaces in the classroom.  With the concept of changing staff rotations, I have defined three individual programming areas for the three groups of three students that we will have in the new schedule.  I'm currently taking measurements for curtains and rods so that we will be able to divide these areas during work time.  This will eliminate distractions for both students and staff as I'm also finding with myself and seven learning assistants in the room that staff on-task time can become an issue.  During group times, we can pull the curtain back.  One of the other things that has prompted this changes is the fact that our school board is paying to add some extra tracking from our bathrooming area (which already has tracking) to about half of our classroom. This area will now be redefined as work space for the students who need the tracking and it will make their programs run much more efficiently :).

In the middle of all this I'm seeing the need to get a better outline of student's programs in their programming binders so am spending time this holiday getting that together.

Its going to be a lot of work but I'm excited to see where it goes.

Over the holidays, I am hoping to work on and post information about the following:

Lunch program that I'm working on for one of my students (which will hopefully expand to be other students over time).  I posted a bit about this already but will be putting together and posting a bunch of materials over the next little while.

Environmental Print Curriculum that I have just gotten and will be using with several of our students starting in January.  It looks great and I'm really excited to use it.  Very appropriate and some great modifications for my students already in place. 

Change to Morning Routines that we will be doing come January. I have decided to do more individual work with morning routines as it just seems to work better.  I will be posting the new materials that I'm working on for this.

General information about our new schedule.

More information on our Community Experiences and Community Recreation programs that were stalled due to down time with pandemic issues and transitioning of students into the program.

Changes to news-2-you approach.  Although we are still using it, I'm finding that it is not really driving our programming as we have so much else going on.  I will post about the changes and plans for using it in the new year.

Never a dull moment in our room.  I constantly feel like there is so much more to learn and do in this job (which for me is a good thing).  With that, I'm off to spend some time with my son as he has just gotten up.

Functional Curriculum Resources Review Document

Just wanted to share this document that I stumbled across the other day.  Its a list of a lot of different resources to develop a funcitonal curriculum broken in to the categories general texts, planning, life skills, social skills, personal care, sexuality, transition, and academics (math, science, social studies, language arts, combined academics, general academics).  One of the things that I really like about the document is that it has one section that tells you what population the resources is intended for.  I haven't gone through it in too much detail but have added it to my bookmarks for future reference.

Here is the link if you're interested in checking it out: Functional Curriculum Resources Review

Lunch Program: Ham Fried Rice Recipe

Over the next little bit I'm going to be building a recipe book for the lunch program that I mentioned below.  I thought I would start sharing the recipes that I'm using.  Note that I will print off double of the visuals so that we can use them to do things like make grocery lists and find needed items.  I will velcro a copy of each visual (for items and ingredients needed) on to the visual that is already on the page.  After a put up a few more recipes, I will include some pictures and explanations of how I'm running the program as right now its just a work in progress.

  Download Ham Fried Rice Recipe

Note that recipe itself came from GFCF Recipe Website and the visuals used are either exact pictures of grocery items or Boardmaker symbols.

Waiting for my orders to come in...

So I just ordered a few things last week and wanted to share as I'm really excited about getting them  I will be posting more about them after I get them and start to use them.  For now I'm just going to share the goodies that I've ordered.  So here they are...

PCI Environmental Print Curriculum: I am hoping to add this as a component to a couple of my student's language arts programs.  I like the direct connection to the communityand how I can ensure that we are looking directly at "real life" applications.  I've had making adapted books and worksheets related to envirornmental print on my "to do" list for about two years now and just have never gotten to it.  I decided to bite the bullet and use some of this year's material budget to buy this package.  I will be posting about it as we get in to it.  If you have used it, please share what has worked and what hasn't worked for you.

 

A Functional Curriculum (from PCI): As my students get older and the population of my classroom changes, I'm starting to see a need to focus more on adaptive skills.  I have a few resources for creating a functional curriculum as well as some great links that I've found but am looking to expand my resources.  These materials looked good.  I couldn't really find anyone who had used them when looking at message boards so don't know how they are going to be "in practice".  Again, if you've used them, I would love to hear about it.  If you haven't, stay tuned for how things work in our classroom once I start to implement things from these resoures.

 

 Switch Adapted Pouring Cup: I have read several blog posts about this devise and have been looking to buy it for some time.  We do a fair amount of cooking/baking in our classroom and with our growing dog biscuit business we are only going to be doing more.  I had a parent volunteer to pay for some equipment that will allow all of our students to participate in this business and this is the first thing that I had on my list of things to buy.  I know we will find many uses for it beyond the kitchen as well.  I am also looking to buy a mixer that has a dough hook that we can use with our power links as well as use Kate's flour sifting idea.  I'm still playing around with ideas for rolling out the dough.  I tried a pasta maker but it doesn't quite work.  If you have ever seen a way to switch adapt rolling out dough for cookies/biscuits I would love to hear it.