Halloween!

Well this school year has made an interesting twist. I have been put on bed rest, at least for this week. I am 31 weeks along and I have been having contractions for a week. I was planning on getting started on all of my sub plans for while I am out, however now a match has been lit under me to do lessons from now until the end of my planned maternity leave. (My leave is scheduled to start mid Dec. and end in Feb.) Halloween is in a couple of weeks however my kids are learning about pumpkins this week. I made a group activity of matching shapes on pumpkins. I just made up some simple cards. I play this during group time and I give each child a card and tell them to find their partner with the matching card. Once everyone has found their partner/match I have each group tell me what shape they have. This helps to not put one child in the spotlight but they can work together.
Maybe in the next few days I will be putting up different activities. They maybe all sorts of different themes with the time frame I am writing for.

You can download the jpg here or go to my tpt store to get it for free :)

Its mail time!

I went to work with a kiddo in their home recently and the parents asked me to work on the skill of learning her address that day. I did some activities that day with what I had and then went home and made this for the next time that I went to their house. It is just an address packet with a place for their information and blank envelopes for them to use. One of the pages also has a list of addresses for the children to practice sending pretend letter to... however some of the addresses will get you a response. (Mickey's, Cinderella's, Kermit's Judy Blume's, and Sesame Street's) I laminated the address page and the envelopes and they are at the writing center for the children to practice with.

This packet is available on my tpt site for free.

The big news in our life!

spelling

I will come right out and proclaim that I VERY STRONGLY DISLIKE the traditional way of teaching children to spelling in America. I feel this way because it works for a small group of children and for the children that it does not work there is not many good alternatives that are used across the country. I am working with a kiddo right now (in a home setting) who is having a hard time with her spelling tests at school each week. I am not there often to help her so this is for a family to use as word work (I like a more hands on less paper word work in my classroom) I posted the packet to tpt and it is free. Many of the things have been done before or something like it, but this just has everything organized together.


In the packet there are 11 pages. I may someday use these as an option for word work choice during language arts. We will see. Right now I live in the land of crawling so word work is not much of a thought.


http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/My-spelling-packet

Sesnory and Autsim Book list

In my spare time I do presentations on Autism and  Sensory Processing Disorder. Here is a book list that  I give out for the books that I recommend. Feel free to print it and share it. These are  just some of my favorites, however there are a lot of great books out there.

Letter Center

So, the last week has been one of the most emotional weeks of my life. I had a student die from the classroom that I had student taught in since August and I started a new job. With all of that stress I ended up sick... But thats ok... I am a stronger person for making it through the last two weeks... any my house does not look awful ;) I started thinking tonight about my Saturday morning and decided to make something. This is just my own version of something that has been done many times (sorry, little creativity left this week) however this is free for you to print off. Just click on the pictures and save off of that. If you want the files email me and I would be happy to send them. I found the font at: http://desktoppub.about.com/od/lessonplans/ig/Free-Print---Cursive-Fonts/Print-Clearly-Dashed.htm. I think I will be using this font a lot from now on because it is a great kid font and what is a better price then free right?

Here is my partially done example

Baking Word Families

I made this activity for a great little kiddo that I get the privilege to work with one on one. We are working on word families as an aspect of learning words. She loves pretending to cook so I thought the theme of baking cookies fit with that. I figured I would share with the internet words because sharing is a nice things to do ans who wouldn't want to share a cookie. They are $1 on tpt (because I used clipart I purchased). If you want any other word families let me know and I can add it to the pack I am selling on tpt. The current word families are:
at,  ail, am, an, eat, eep, ell, ice, ay, ing, in, ip, it, oat, og, oil, ool, op, ot, uck, ug, unk

Each word family has a cookie tray page and four cookies to be matched to the correct tray.



teachers pay teachers

clip-art from: scapindoodles.com