Jing

This screencast video shows how I would use a social story on SMART notebook to teach my students about the rules for our center/play time. Since my 3-6 year old students don't yet use the computer independently, I chose to show how I would use the SMART board lesson with them. This is an activity I use for several days in a row at the beginning of each school year. I read the story to them and then demonstrate how to use the clips and point out the location of each center.

Flat Stanley Map Lesson

For my lesson, I would create a google map to go along with the story Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown. In the story, a board falls on a boy named Stanley, making him flat. Stanley then mails himself around the world in envelopes to visit his friends.

For my lesson, my students would first read the story. They would then create paper portraits of themselves and name them "Flat (their name)". Each student would be asked to mail several copies of their flat self around the world to different cities or states. They would include a letter asking the recipients to send a return letter addressed to our class and perhaps include a photo or postcard of something from their part of the world. We would then document all of the locations that we received letters from on our google map by saving the locations. The map of all of the locations could be displayed on the SMART board each day or week to show the locations on the map that go along with the letters and photos we would be reading or looking at. We could then also interact with our map by going to street view or weather to explore the different places our flat selves have visited. The map below is just an example of a world map with several locations marked. Our map would be similar but would contain many more pegs.



View Nairobi in a larger map

Podcasts

Here is a link to the "Sid the Science Kid" podcast from PBS kids.  It can be found on iTunes. The episodes I listened to were "Summer Activities To Do With Your Preschooler" and "Science Centers." This would be an appropriate podcast to use to get ideas for my Early Childhood Special Education classroom. In the summer activities episode, they talk about ideas about integrating science activities during everyday summertime life. Some examples include learning about temperature after feeling cold coming out of a pool or doing some planting and gardening. In science center episode, they talk about the benefits of visiting science centers (or a museum). They give personal experiences of visiting these places with their own children and ideas for types of places to visit. Other topics that can be learned about on Sid's podcasts are libraries, play time, literature, or different holidays. This website could be useful for either parents our teachers working with preschool age children.

Multimedia

Early Signs of Autism

My nieces and nephew

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My School

Photobucket

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