Celebrating Thanksgiving in the Special Education Classroom

The holiday season is my absolute favorite time of year outside and inside of the classroom! My students and I always have so much fun celebrating the holidays. And the first holiday to kick things off will be here before we know it! Keep reading to learn more about how I celebrate Thanksgiving in my special education classroom.

ELA Ideas

• Each November, I introduce our Thanksgiving vocabulary words which we will use throughout the month during various activities and stories. 

• A big vocabulary concept we focus on at this time is the idea of past and present we typically do the accompanying unit from Unique Learning System and supplement with other fun stories and activities including this sorting activity.

• We also read I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie by Alison Jackson. I use picture-supported communication boards to make the story accessible to all my learners. 

After we read the story together several times throughout the week, we like to watch it on YouTube as well. This can be a great independent activity for students during centers time. I will set them up on their Chromebook (or an iPad with guided access 😉) and also provide the picture-based communication board from when we read as a group. 

Social Group Ideas

• The absolute highlight of our Thanksgiving unit is our classroom Thanksgiving Feast. It is such a fun tradition and we love to invite staff throughout the school to stop by during their lunch period to join the fun. 

• During the Thanksgiving feast, each student practices asking peers or staff to pass the different foods using this picture-supported script. 

• After the feast, all of the students fill out a taste test rating each of the foods they tried. We send it home that evening and my parents have really appreciated having this little "cheatsheet" for their family Thanksgiving dinner, especially for our picky eaters who sometimes surprise us by trying new things after participating in the preparation and getting excited about their peers trying new things too. 

Math Ideas

• Before the feast, we talk a lot about buying the foods we will need. Some years we have checked ads and on one rare occasion we actually took a class field trip to the grocery store to buy our feast foods! It was kinda stressful but kind of great at the same time... as many things can be in our classroom!

• To go along with the idea of shopping for our feast foods, I have a fun menu math activity that I made for students. 

• What better tool for teaching fractions than a pie?! I admit it can be messy but messy is memorable! Some years we baked a pie during cooking and then used it to talk about fractions. In other years we bought mini-pies. And one year a VERY sweet para baked mini-pies for every student so they could each have their own. 

• I created another follow-up activity to assess their fraction knowledge.

Cooking & Craft Ideas

• We try to make as much of our Thanksgiving feast as possible at school. Aside from the turkey. We tend to outsource for that! 

• The kids have a blast making these turkey cupcakes for dessert!

• They also have so much fun when we make "Pilgrim ink" with charcoal during our concept study about the past. They think writing with feathers is the funniest thing ever. 

These recipes can be found in my Thanksgiving Thematic Unit or my Visual Recipes for the Entire Year resource. 

Interested in these activities and more? Grab my Thanksgiving Thematic Unit in my TPT store!

In addition to cross-curricular, interactive lesson materials, each of my thematic units include:

• Set-Up Instructions

• Implementation Tips for Whole/Small Group, 1:1, and independent work times for each activity

• Differentiation Tips for Accommodating and Extending each activity to meet student needs

Top 5 Tips for Carving a Pumpkin in the Special Education Classroom

Pumpkin carving is one of my favorite Halloween activities in my classroom but it definitely takes some planning! Here are my Top 5 Tips for Carving a Pumpkin in the Special Education Classroom. 

Tip #1: Consider Sensory Needs

Sometimes a student may not be comfortable touching the pumpkin guts so you can allow them to use gloves or even put some in a ziploc baggy to let them explore in a less overwhelming way. Sometimes I had students who would absolutely gag at the sight of the pumpkin guts. I allowed them to do something else during that time like painting pumpkins or using stickers. This activity is not worth that much distress! 

Tip #2: Use Visual Supports

We started by watching a video or reading a story about carving a pumpkin to preview the activity. Then, students completed this sequencing activity from my Halloween Thematic Unit to provide us with a visual step-by-step guides with clear pictures and text to help students understand the carving process. 

Tip #3: Allow Students to Design The Pumpkin

Give students the opportunity to express their creativity by designing their own pumpkin faces or patterns. My students with strong fine motor or drawing skills would draw their own pumpkin faces while my students who needed more support would use the Pick A Pumpkin activity from Starfall.com.

After all of the designs were completed, we would take a class vote on which one we wanted to use. We definitely had some unique (and adorable) finished products over the years!

Tip #4: Make Clean Up Easier

Use newspaper or a vinyl tablecloth to project your table (and maybe your floor!) from the pumpkin guts. They can stick and stain! 

We also use sharpie to draw the face on the pumpkin and can easily remove any extra residue after carving with some acetone or hand sanitizer! 
 

Tip #5: Take a class picture!

These are some of my most treasured classroom pictures because of all the memories they hold!

For more fun Halloween and fall activities for your special education classroom, check out my previous blog post:

Fall Activities in the Special Education Classroom

Cooking in the Special Education Classroom

Each week in my special education classroom we do cooking and craft extension activities related to our thematic unit. We have had a lot of fun over the years with all of our different projects!

Each week, we use a visual recipe for students to follow along. On the front, are icons for all of the ingredients and supplies. On the back, are picture-supported directions for each step of the recipe. 

Are you interested in implementing some thematic cooking activities in your classroom? My Visual Recipes for the Entire Year resource has 50 different visual recipes that can be printed and ready to go each week! 

My paraprofessionals are in charge of planning our thematic cooking and craft activities each week. This gives me an awesome opportunity to be on "the other side of the table" assisting students and seeing how they all do with group activities without the stress of managing the group as a whole. I love switching it up like this and giving my paras something special that they enjoy coordinating each week. 

Each week I choose students to be the Head Chef and Head Artist who will assist my paras during the group. These two jobs are hands-down the class favorites. I think it is basically because they get to do so many of the "teacher" jobs (passing out supplies, modeling the activity, calling on students) and sit in the coveted "teacher" chair at the kidney table.

Each Monday, we go over who gets to do the head jobs. I like talking about it on Monday because it give the kids something to look forward to and for those kids that need the extra behavior motivation it helps also. I place the students' names under these cute signs (click the link below the picture to print!)

Head Jobs Signs

To make the job even more special I made these adorable aprons for the kids to wear. They love them! I even had a little guy that didn't really understand that the jobs were assigned each week and for a couple weeks after his turn he went over to the apron at cooking time and tried to put it on! Thankfully, he was a great sport. 

These aprons were super easy to make and very affordable. I bought two children's aprons at Michael's and some puffy paint at Walmart. First, I drew the pictures using pencil. I was able to do it free hand but you could look at clip art images if you needed some inspiration! Then, I filled in the pencil drawings with puffy paint (I used small paint brushes to spread). After the paint dried, I used a black Sharpie to draw the outlines. Finally, I added a few details with the puffy paint. 

I made these last year and they had to be washed a lot this year. I was impressed with how well they held up! At the end of the year, I just retouched a few of the areas with puffy paint. The lettering seemed to be peeling the most. I think this is partially from little fingers picking at it :). 

What to Teach in December in the Elementary Special Education Classroom

The holiday season is my absolute favorite time of year outside and inside of the classroom! My students and I always have so much fun celebrating the holidays. 

 

Check out some of my favorite December activities:

ELA Ideas

• Read The Gingerbread Man. I love this version retold by Mary Sandel from the Fountas and Pinnell intervention collection because it is predictable for making picture-supported sentences and easy enough for my emerging readers to read the text. 

• My favorite Christmas books are:
• Clifford’s Christmas by Norman Bridwell
• The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell by Lucille Colandro
• In addition to using picture-supported sentence boards, I also have an old lady doll that I have students take turns feeding throughout the story. I just print an extra copy of the sentence board at a larger scale, laminate and cut out the pieces, and then pass them out to each of the students as the story starts. It is a great interactive activity and really builds joint attention and engagement during the read aloud! 

• My favorite Holiday Traditions books are:
• Kevin’s Kwanzaa by Lisa Bullard
• The Night Before Hanukkah by Natasha Wing

Math Ideas

• One of my favorite math activity for the holidays is a tree decorating craft incorporating money. I print out tree outlines on green cardstock. Next, I gather decorations for the students to glue on their trees. Then, I give each student a buying menu so that they can purchase the decorations they want. I differentiated this activity three ways by having one buying menu with coin icons for matching the coin to the picture to make the purchase, another option with prices to work on single coin values, and finally an option with prices in multiples of 5 so students can count out nickels or easily use TouchMoney. 

Cooking & Craft Ideas

• I love making special gifts with my students for their families. We always have so much fun creating, wrapping, and sending special cards home. This Santa handprint mason jar is one of my favorites!

• When celebrating Christmas, we love making Christmas Cookies. Some years I make them from scratch with the kids and other years when we are feeling rushed for time I will get the pre-cut cookies so we can focus on the best part... DECORATING!

• When celebrating Holiday Traditions like Kwanzaa and Hannukkah, we make sweet potato pie and marshmallow dreidels. 

• For all of my favorite classroom visual recipes check out my Visual Recipes for the Whole Year on TPT. 

Social Group Ideas

• Each year we have a small celebration in my classroom where my paraprofessionals and I give gifts to the students and the kids have fun opening and playing with their new toys. Then we have treats, play games, and dance to some holiday music. Then, my students join their homeroom general education classrooms for their parties as well. 

Interested in these activities and more? Why not bundle and save!