Exceptional Learning for Exceptional Kids: A few of our projects

Here are some pictures of our completed works during my first half of student teaching in elementary. Being a student teacher, I was limited in taking any pictures that remotely involved the kids, so I will show the finished products, displayed on our bulletin board along with a description of the activity.

This was part of our Fall unit. The kids (with assistance) tore paper to create the grass and tree branches. I then tried to incorporate some choice making and technology by offering (depending on the student) 2-3 bigmac switches that matched the color choice with the color word recorded and each student chose what color they wanted to use for leaves. We dipped their fingers in the paint and used their finger prints for the leaves.

This was an activity we did for fun after our repeated reading (students read using the Step by Step with story prerecorded) of the book, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see?". We used chocolate pudding to paint our bears after we helped trace and cut them out. I liked this one because unlike paint, I didn't mind if the kids put their messy hands in their mouths :)

Kind of hard to tell in the picture but I called this activity Fly Swatter Math. It was an idea I adapted from a lesson I saw an awesome teacher do during my undergrad observations. We used an All-Turn-It spinner (from ablenet) and each student hit the switch to spin the spinner and see how many "flies" they had to make. I made my own template for the spinner and actuially glued puff balls for each number so my visually impaired students (and the rest of my kids too!) could "feel" how many. We then used black paint to make a fingerprint for each fly depending on the number they spun. After this, to demonstrate the 1:1 coorespondance aspect, we took fly swatters dipped in bright green paint (fly guts) to "squash" each fly counting outloud as we went. The kids loved feeling and hearing the fly swatter "SMACK" against the paper as we counted. TIP: use big paper, this creates a bit of splatter!