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! ...

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 attenti......

December is my favorite month in the classroom. Yes, I admit it can be a bit chaotic with the holiday parties and overall excitement but it is a lot of fun and there are so many fun themes that we do each year. Each year, I start with our gingerbread theme. Below are my favorite gingerbread activity ideas from my special education classroom.    ELA Ideas Read The Gingerbread Man. I always use the version retold by Mary Sandel from the Fountas and Pinnell intervention collection.  Practice positional words using a gingerbread doll , cookie , or cutout and a cookie jar  (I like this plastic cookie jar because it is not breakable!).  Use the stem "(Name) ran away from the ______." during predictable chart writing and then use my class book template to create a book students can read again and again!  Math Ideas Practice subtraction activities using gingerbread manipulatives, or for some added fun use cookies and let students eat them as they subtract!  Co......