Gina from The Autism Helper walks through a snowman lesson using the adapted book "What Is the Snowman Wearing?" The activities include sorting cotton balls, dressing a teacher with real scarves and hats, and creating a paper snowman. She shows how to stretch the lesson from one day to a week and adapt it for different skill levels.
Hi everyone, it's Gina from The Autism Helper. I'm here today to show you a really fun snowman activity lesson plan. This can span over 1 day, 2 days, an entire week. It all depends on your students, but I love taking activities and making different lessons that generalize different concepts within the same theme. So for this month, um, I'm launching into snowman, and if you haven't seen it, Sarah has an awesome adapted snowman series. This one is "What Is the Snowman Wearing?" I love this book. A lot of my kids are learning to identify clothing pieces right now and color, so this works perfectly for those skills. It also works on print skills, following directions, language. It is just— I love all of Sarah's adapted books. So, in that spirit, this is some act— these are some activities you can do with this book. And I have made you, if you can see on my screen, a group schedule board that has all of the activities listed on it as well as a visual of the snowman activity, the culminating activity at the end of the week or the end of the lesson, whenever you want to do this. A little free visual for you as well. Those will be in my post. Let's go through the activities really quickly. First, you have the snowman book. Again, it comes with a page of pieces. I don't have all of them right now. You'll see why. I love the coil binding for books. But also, if your students are new at these, sometimes having them just on a binder ring is kind of nice because you can take out some of the pages that maybe you don't want to quite work on. This amount of pages may be too overwhelming to your students. You may work with really little kids and their attention spans 30 seconds, so you might just do 2 or 3 pages. So having them on a binder ring gives you a little bit more flexibility when using this type of book. But I would go through the book first and take turns finding what it has in there. So it says, "Look, a red hat on the snowman." So then you have to find the snowman on the page. Maybe you bring down a few of the snowmen for them. Maybe you make it errorless and you just give them the correct answer. It's whatever is best for your kids. There are some pages in here that have 3 descriptors on them. So this might be a little bit challenging for some of your kids. For example, this page says, "Look, an orange hat and scarf." So, they have to find a color and 2 clothing descriptors. So, that might be a little bit more challenging. You can feel free to take these pages out if you're not quite there yet. So, that's the adapted book. And then, as always, I love using materials in multi-different ways. I then go ahead and I put some cotton balls in a little shoebox or a any type of box you have, and I put the, some of the snowmen in the box. So then we can start working on receptive language. You can say, "Find the snowman who has the red hat and the red scarf." Or maybe your students are just picking out one at a time and they're expressively telling you about it or on their AAC device. So lots of different ways you can have fun with this. Just a different way to use your materials and generalize that concept so that these aren't only in a book, now they're in a box or in some other different type of activity. Activity. I also have this clothing activity on here. I love using real objects to generalize concepts. Well, that way children think when they see a scarf in the book that they know that a scarf can also look like this in real life. So, I like to put some different clothing items in a bag that correspond with the story, and kids can come up and take turns pulling something out and labeling it. And then you can practice dressing the teacher with the items, especially if it's your hat. So have fun with this activity. Dressing, labeling, following directions, and putting things in bags increases engagement so much. Um, the last activity I have is kind of like my culminating activity. I figured we could actually dress a snowman with, um, some little clothing pieces. So I found this free template online. I literally just Googled free snowman clothing and this one came up from First Palette. I'm gonna link it for you. And depending on the level of your students or where they're at, you might have them color the pieces. You can also look for already colored pieces on Teachers Pay Teachers if you don't, if your kids aren't quite into coloring quite yet. And then first what you wanna do is make the background. And I do have this activity right here and the different steps. So first you'll make the background by using some white paint and a cotton ball on a clothespin and dabbing. You can also work on core language such as big, little, making the snowballs in the background. And then you're gonna color the pieces or maybe you've already printed some out with color and you've cut them out, depends on your student level. And then you're gonna cut the pieces out or maybe assist your students in cutting. And then let them make their snowman any way they want. It doesn't matter to me if the snowman's pieces are all over the board and the hat maybe isn't quite on the head. It depends on what kind of art you wanna do. If you wanna have teacher letter that process or child process art. I really love to see how the kids look at a model and what they develop on their own. So those are just some fun activities to go along with the Snowman Dressing Book. So let me know if you get to try this with your kids this winter.
