Can you believe it is already November?! What an exciting month to begin diving in to the holiday season in the special education classroom.
Thanksgiving
At the end of the month, I love to throw a Thanksgiving Feast with my students. We always invite our related service providers and district administrators to join in the festivities. This is one of my favorite hands-on projects we do each year!
We practice reading skills by following a shopping list...
My gingerbread units have some excellent activities for my Shared Reading and Shared Writing instructional times.
The predictable text of The Gingerbread Man is always so much fun for my students. I love incorporating it into our sentence-building boards or using it as a script on a student's switch.
Now that routines are well established and classroom behavior is well managed, I am able to spend more time daily on literacy instruction so I have also introduced some phonics activities including phonological awareness activities and my letter of the day activities which I created through my research of the Science of Reading and how it applies to my students with the complex learning needs.
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.
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!
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!
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