What to Teach in January in the Special Education Classroom

It's a new year and a new month in the special education classroom! This means it is time for some new themes and picture books to engage your learners. Since we have returned from break we have been enjoying lots of fun snow-related books and activities. Keep reading to see what we are up to this month!

Reading

The first week we studied The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. I love talking about Peter and all the fun snowy day adventures he goes on. Interested in using this story with your students? Click the image below to grab my Communication and Comprehension Support unit on my TpT Store!

After The Snowy Day, we read The Jacket I Wear in the Snow by Shirley Neitzel. 

To go along with the story I also created some vocabulary and communication supports, reading comprehension activities, and progress monitoring sheets that you can grab by clicking the image below:

We also read Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Eric Carle and There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow by Lucille Colandro

Grab these reading boards as part of my Snow & Winter Thematic Unit in my TPT store! 

Science

My favorite activity with The Snowy Day is our snowball experiment. The kids LOVE getting on their mittens and making big snowballs to place in their pockets (inside plastic baggies). Throughout the morning we check on our snowballs to see what "state" they are in: snowball, melting, or water. 

We have a recording sheet that we use with 6 boxes for 6 different observation periods (put in my pocket, after 5 minutes, after 15 minutes, after 30 minutes, after 1 hour, after 2 hours). I did not make the recording sheet and after searching all over the internet I wasn't able to find it so I am not sure where it came from!!

To go with our sheet I made Boardmaker picture options for my kiddos with limited writing and verbal skills. It was very easy. Unfortunately I was short an aide the day we did the experiment so I had my hands full and did not get a chance to take pictures :(.


After our snowball experiment, we expanded on the idea of melting snow to learn about solids, liquids, and gases. We used dry ice to illustrate gas so that it was easy for the students to see. Then, we took actual pictures from the experiment and I displayed them on the whiteboard for students to match our vocabulary icons to them. It was a lot of fun to do a hands-on activity and immediately review concepts we had already been learning about. 

As a culminating activity, my students completed a States of Matter Sort cut-and-paste activity (also included in my Snow and Winter Thematic Unit on TPT).

Cooking

After several weeks of holiday treats it was nice to have a healthy treat! We made these cute snowman faces out of toasted bagels with cream cheese, olive eyes, carrot noses (of course), red pepper lips, earmuffs made of broccoli and spray cheese.

How cute are they?!

Also, I have a student on a gluten-, dairy- free diet and he was easily able to make a similar treat with a gluten-free waffle. Usually we use powdered sugar to make it white but on this day he did not feel like it. He did however enjoy making vampire teeth on his snowman!

I also wanted to find snacks that would expand upon our concepts of melting and states of matter so we also made koolaid popsicles (to talk about freezing a liquid to make a solid) and Snowman S'mores (to talk about using heat to turn a solid into a liquid). 

Visual Recipes from Snow & Winter Thematic Unit

Art

Another activity we did were these cute salt dough snowmen. The recipe for the dough did not go very well and they ended up very dry and then we added too much water and they were too mushy so we tried more flour and we never really perfected the measurements BUT the kids still had fun and it was definitely a learning experience! A few days later one of the other classrooms tried this activity and they added more water gradually using a spray bottle (a trick for pie crusts apparently!) and theirs had a much better consistency! After making the dough and creating the snowmen, the kids used yarn, pipe cleaners, sequins and buttons to decorate them.

After reading The Jacket I Wear in the Snow, our focus was winter clothing and we had fun dressing up in different winter clothes and making this cute class clothesline of clothing that the kids painted with watercolors and decorated with anything they could find in our art cabinet (buttons, cotton balls, foamies, glitter glue, etc).

We also made these cute flip posters. All of the kids colored the poster of the boy or girl any colors they wanted. Then, my kids who were writers used a color word bank to complete the sentences and my kids who are non-writers used my modified sentences where they had to just color in the circle to match the clothing item named. The kids really enjoyed this activity and they turned out super cute!

Math

Round snowballs were the perfect visual for introducing basic fractions. 

And melting snowmen were a great visual for basic subtraction. 

Some of my students were able to complete this worksheet using the cross-out subtraction method, while others needed something more hands-on so I used these great Snowman Manipulatives from Amazon. 

Snow and Winter Thematic Unit

And for more wintertime Thematic Group Activities, grab my Snow & Winter Unit on Teacher Pay Teacher!

Winter Bundle

Or grab all three of these awesome resources and be ready to tackle lesson planning all winter long with my bundle!

Next week we are learning all about polar animals so check back then to see our cute polar animal activities!