I will be using these ideas from September 21 through to Ocotober 9 and will post a new topic towards the end of that time frame. Note that I'm posting this today (September 12) but will be adding a few things throughout this next week or so as I do not start this topic until September 21. I will move this post back to the top when I do add things.
I got the idea to share the plans I'm making related to news-2-you from the blog entitled Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs. I enjoyed the outline format that was used and thought I would do something similar as I found resources and made plans. Given the way I function, I have decided that I will generally be using the papers every 2nd week and generally one week later than what they were intended for. This will give me the time I need to make sure materials are adapted for my students and also give my students the time they need to really explore any new topic. If I make any materials with Boardmaker, I will post them here for download as well as post them in the Adapted Learning news-2-you group.
Note that I have not put a bunch of ideas that I am planning to use from other sources. You can check these out here:
Pete's Stuff: The Wizzard of Oz: Fantastic resource with lots of great ideas. No sense reinventing the wheel when there is so much great stuff out there already I figure :).
SMD Teacher: There are a whole bunch of links to Wizzard of Oz ideas on this blog. Check the left-hand side bar for a series of links related to this story.
Morning Gathering Time Activities
Each morning during morning gathering time we will take some time to do an activity related to the current newspaper. Many of these will be related to choice making or sensory activities. Here is an outline of the activities we will be working on for this newspaper timeframe:
Language Arts (Vocabulary, Literacy, Composition, Communication...etcSeptember 21: Wizzard of Oz Sensory Story Part 1: I will be using materials from "Pete's Stuff" (see link near top of post). If I add anything or make any changes I will post them as I get closer to doing the project so stay tuned.
September 22: Sharing Our Homes: Students share pictures of their homes - send home a note to bring pictures of home (outside, inside, bedroom...etc.) that students can share with eachother. Concentrate on communication skills. I will keep the pictures as we use them for programming activities for many of our students. I also have a few talking photo books that we can make books out of for students to look at later.
September 23: Will the Wind Blow it Off?: By this point students will have completed the Religion activities related to God creating sky and land. One of the activities is to find out what things will stay in the sky (light) and which ones won't. This will be a similar activity (allows for the repetition that my students need) where I hold up an item and ask students to vote if it will blow off a table when I put it on the table in front of the fan. Then we test their predictions.
September 24: Wizzard of Oz Sensory Story Part 2: I will be using materials from "Pete's Stuff" (see link near top of post). If I add anything or make any changes I will post them as I get closer to doing the project so stay tuned.
September 25: Yellow Show and Share: Bring in something yellow to share with classmates.September 28: Dress the Classroom Scarecrow: Draw a large scarecrow and then have students vote between different articles of clothing to put on him (which shirt, which hat, which pants, which shoes...etc.) Track votes and then dress him in the way the majority of the students vote.
September 29: Wizzard of Oz Sensory Story Part 3: I will be using materials from "Pete's Stuff" (see link near top of post). If I add anything or make any changes I will post them as I get closer to doing the project so stay tuned.
September 30: Love It or Hate It: This one is related to the heart that the tinman is looking for. Have a variety of items for students to taste, touch or look at and then have them vote on if they "love it" or "hate it".
October 1: Scared Faces: Have pictures of different faces and sort in to scared and not scared as a group. Talk about courage and being scared.
October 2: Wizzard of Oz Sensory Story Part 4: I will be using materials from "Pete's Stuff" (see link near top of post). If I add anything or make any changes I will post them as I get closer to doing the project so stay tuned.
October 5: Green Voting (Emerald City): Students do taste testing on green items and vote on if they like them or not.
October 6: Wizzard of Oz Sensory Story Part 5: I will be using materials from "Pete's Stuff" (see link near top of post). If I add anything or make any changes I will post them as I get closer to doing the project so stay tuned.
October 7: Sharing Our Families: Students bring in pictures of their family members and share them with the class. I keep these as well as we can use them for programming activities as well as with the talking photo albums mentioned above.
October 8: Wrapping Up: Nothing specific planned for this day as I will use it to wrap up and/or finish/expand on things we didn't get to.
Pete's Stuff Wizzard of Oz Sensory Story: Broken in to five seperate parts with Power Points and suggestions of sensory items to incorporate into the story. We will do a new part of the story every few days during morning routines. As I get closer to using this, I will post any additions/changes that I have made for my students just as a well of sharing ideas. Again, many of these items (along with a disk and explanation) will go in to a Book Bin when I'm done with this theme.
There Is No Place Like Home Student Composition: Students will make books titled "There is No Place Like Home" in which they will include information about their homes, who lives there, what they do there...etc. I will post an outline for this composition as I get closer to the date we are going to use it.
Switches and/or Computers
Pete's Stuff Wizzard of Oz Switch Games: Again the download of activities listed above will need to be downloaded to check these out. This are simple single switch games that students can use to work on basic switch access (perfect for several of my students this year).
Record book on Bookworm and have students read the story using the Bookworm.
Use of switch for recorded lines when doing sensory story outlined in several places above (from Pete's Stuff).
Use of switch to do experimenation with wind.
Mathematics
Laying a Yellow Brick Road: How many of each size of brick are needed to make a yellow brick road that covers a certain path? We would use paper bricks as opposed to real bricks just because of the size.
Following the Yellow Brick Road using a map.
Directions - North, South, East, West
Sequencing the Story
Counting Activities - munckins and/or flying monkeys
Science/Sensory Explorations
Tornado and Wind Explorations
Body Parts: Where is your heart and your brain?
Green Day (Emerald City)
Red Day (Ruby Slippers)
Yellow Day (Yellow Brick Road)
Change our Hanging Toys so that they are set up with Rainbow Ribbons in the order of the rainbow and then put colored hanging toys of each color between the ribbons.
Color Sorting Activities (Rainbows)
Feild of Poppies - Change our Snoezelen room in to a quiet "field of poppies" area by putting up cut out poppies everywhere (or if I can find fake flowers that look like poppies at the dollar store putting those up).
Social Studies/Life Skills
There is No Place Like Home Composition Sharing: sharing stories about our homes after we have made (outlined in Language Arts section above).
Rooms in the Home Sorting: Therasimplicity has some grreat activities for students in our classroom. They have one where you print off pictures of different rooms in the home along with cards of items that would go in that room. Then you place the cards in the appropriate room. I cannot link directly to it as I had signed up for a free membership at one point and found this one.
Real and Make Belief: Talk about the difference between real and make belief and sort things in to these two categories. I will be making some Boardmaker files related to this and posting them sometime in the next week or so.
Good and Bad: I'm still in the thinking stage of how to address the concept of good/bad with the range of students that I have. I will post more soon.
Cooking
Pete's Stuff Recipe Book: the link to Pete's Stuff above includes a recipe book and has such recipes as "Yellow Brick Road" (toffee), "Gingerbread Munchkins", "Witches Brew" (fruit punch), "Scrawcrow Heads" (chocolate next cakes). We will use a few of these as is and I will make Boardmaker visuals for sequencing. We also incorporate object functions in to cooking by having students decide what we are going to need to complete different tasks.
For the "witches brew" we will run a competition for each team to come up with an original blender drink and see whose drink is the best.
Game and/or Leisure Skills
Classroom Salon: Spend an afternoon doing hair, nails, foot baths, pampering...etc. This is tied in to the movie as the group gets pampered in the salon after they come to Emerald City and before they see the Wizzard. Note that I'm also looking in to going to a local high school that has a cosmotology program to do this as an outing as well.
Watch the Wizzard of Oz Movie
Wizzard of Oz Matching Game: Will be posting Boardmaker cards for this soon.
Fine Arts (Music, Drama, Art...etc.)
Ruby Slippers: Take cheap canvas shoes and paint them red with fabric paint. Then add a variety of jewels to decorate them. Could also just do with a cut out cardboard shoe.
Tornado Craft: Make a tornado out of stiff paper and then add things that would spin in the tornado (go outside and collect items). Hang from the ceiling as decorations.
Wizzard of Oz Story Characters: Once again relying on Pete's Stuff listed above. Students will make each of the story charaters. We will incorporate sensory materials when making the characters.
Wizzard of Oz Music: Play when working on activities, as a leisure activity or in the Snoezelen room.
Adapted P.E.
Yellow Brick Road Relay Races
Munckin Bean Toss Game
Flying Monkeys Parachute Games
Community Integration
Wizzard of Oz Community Scavenger Hunt: Find a heart, courage, brain, field of poppies, witches, home...etc. (incorporate N, E, S, W directions). Set up the scavenger hunt for other students in the school as well. Have our students "read" the clues with a step-by-step switch.
Trip to a Beauty Salon
mom2mikey
mbraat_99
Fantastic ideas! :-)
For APE my group LOVED our version of duck-duck-goose using "lions-and tigers-and bears-OH MY!" Programmed that onto a step by step switch and when they got to OH MY they ran. :-) Very fun. I have to say our Wizard of Oz project is one of my favorites.
Posted by: Alicia | Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 07:14 PM
Thanks Alicia. That game sounds like a lot of fun and we will for sure be trying it out when we do this theme. I have to say once I started digging in to this theme I started thinking about how I would like to do it for longer than 3 weeks but I'm going to stick with the initial 3 week plan. I'm thinking we are going to do Octoberfest next even though we will be a bit after the official dates of Octoberfest. I will have to see what the next newspapers will be before I decide.
Posted by: Monica | Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 08:10 PM
That's always been the hard part for me, deciding how to spend enough time on a topic from News-2-You and not miss out on other fun topics. Now I'm using Unique and have to say so far I'm liking it. We're currently doing the May unit on sounds and my staff voted to skip the September unit (mostly on Abraham Lincoln) and do the October unit on biomes instead. We've been so busy with that, tho, that we haven't had time for News-2-You!
Posted by: Alicia | Sunday, September 13, 2009 at 03:59 PM
I've looked at the Unique curriculum as an option as well. I was overwhelmed with the idea of modifying the government stuff to allow for the fact that our school is in Canada. I figured with news-2-you I can pick and choose and work around that. All the same, I did download the Unique summer curriculum and might try that in June 2010 just to see if its something that will work as I do like the idea of monthly themes more than the weekly newspapers simply because it takes some time to put together materials. Do you get all the themes at the beginning of the year with Unique or do they come out each month? Do they change their curriculum from year to year or would you end up doing the same things again next year?
Posted by: Monica | Sunday, September 13, 2009 at 04:11 PM