For me, school isn't finished yet but I'm already thinking about next year.
Calendar is one of my favorite parts of the day and these take a bit to get set up so I want to start now.
When I first started to do a calendar program with my students, I struggled with how to include everyone. I had a diverse group of kids. I had several students on the autism spectrum, several with physical disabilities and several with speech and language issues.
I had several students with no verbal skills at all but their fine motor skills were fine.
And I had children with verbal skills but poor fine motor skills.
And then I had some children that didn't have any verbal or fine motor skills.
How was I going to include everyone?
What I came up with was a interactive calendar that everyone could participate in.
We start our calendar by talking about what day it is. At the beginning of the year I only have "Today is" showing but when they get good at that, I replace the page with this one that includes yesterday and tomorrow.
In order to keep my "printers" busy while other students are still picking the day and making their sentence, I have them fill out this sheet that has them print out the date.
I also have them trace the number on the calendar.
We count the number of days that we have been at school. In order to give students that can't colour an opportunity to participate, I made this 100 chart with Velcro. The squares are removable so that the children can see the number of days.
For my students that can colour, I use this sheet.
I have a couple of options for the weather depending on the skill level of each child.
I then have each child read their sentence back to me. Using a pretend microphone is a good motivator.
We also make a graph of the weather for the month. This one is for my students that can't colour.
And this is one for my students who can colour.
After we talk about the weather we dress our friend for the day. I have boy and girl friends and they love dressing them.
We do patterns next. We start off doing simple patterns and progress to more difficult ones as the year goes by.
This year we started doing 10 frames. I would hold up a number or a set of dots or say a number out loud and the children would have to fill in their 10 frame with the correct number of dots.
As the year progresses I add more and more pages to the book. I start out with a basic book and as the children become more proficient in their skills, I add harder skills.
One of the higher level skills I add is adding. Each day we pick a domino. I have the children make the domino at the top of their sheet.
They then translate that to numbers and then show the total.
For my students that need more fine motor practice I also have some extra sheets for the to work on.
Tracing at the beginning of the year.
The alphabet as the year progresses.
After the 100th day of school I switch from counting to 100 to doing tally's.
I do time with my grade one's.
This one I've done several ways. At the beginning of the year I call out a number and have the children colour in the matching circle. I use bingo daubers with children with poor fine motor skills. Later on in the year I hold up circles with dots in them, have the children count the dots and then colour in the circles. I also have a sheet with teen numbers.
The last one I do is shapes. I call out a shape and have the children colour in the matching one on their sheet.
