Can you believe it is already March? It shocks me every year! In our classroom, there has always been two big celebrations each March... Read Across America Day and St. Patrick's Day.
Our focus each year for Read Across America is Green Eggs and Ham. In my first year of teaching, this was a favorite of one of my students with limited communication. He just LOVED the book and had memorized each page. We all loved to have him read it to us because it was so wonderful to hear him say so much! So from that point on Green Eggs and Ham has always been a mainstay in my room.
Over the years, I added more and more activities that we could do with the story so that we could address IEP goals and meet all the needs of my students including practicing vocabulary and building sentences using a communication board, velcro pieces, or our trusty classroom GoTalk!
I also created lots of comprehension activities so that I had something that fit the needs of each student. We worked on wh-questions, sequencing, and fill-in-the-blank sentences.
Then I used my progress monitoring sheet framework to create corresponding differentiated data collection sheets.
Reading with my students was definitely fun for me... but what was really fun for the kids was actually making green eggs and ham to try!
In a room full of students with various sensory differences, some students were definitely more eager than others! The mood of the classroom ranged from enthusiastic....
Eating green food definitely gets us ready for everything green during our St. Patrick's Day Unit! I grew up going to a predominately Irish Catholic grade school in Cleveland. St. Patrick's Day was such a big deal that we always had the day off so everyone could go downtown for the parade. For most of my childhood I spent the day marching in the parade and Irish dancing at various cultural centers. My love for St. Patrick's Day was definitely something I wanted to bring to my classroom (it isn't as popular in the Dayton area). So I created a whole unit for us to celebrate!
The students learned vocabulary, we made green "potion" to go along with our green eggs and ham, played games, did themed math activities!
We also took the opportunity to talk about rainbows and colors. One of our favorite activities was melting and mixing colored ice cubes to see what colors we created!
Another favorite activity (especially for me!) was our social skills group where we shared compliments about why we were lucky to have each person as part of our class.
And now I am compiled all of my activities to create a few products for Teachers Pay Teachers to make it easier for other teachers to implement these units in their classrooms!
For the reading and comprehension activities, check out my Greens Eggs and Ham Unit.
And for the thematic activities (including the green eggs and ham recipe!) check out my St. Patrick's Day Unit.
Or get all of your March lesson plans done early and grab both in the bundle!
