Michelle shows her special education ELA center with small teacher-led groups. She uses themed matching workbooks, daily curriculum with data sheets, file-folder activities, and the Square Panda app to build skills and independence while tracking progress.
Hi Autism Helper community! It's Michelle here with the Autism Helper website and blog. I'm here to show you an extension on my classroom tour. This is my English language arts center. In my class, we do 6 centers. This is a teacher-led center, meaning I have a teacher and groups of students at this desk during center time. I have between 1 to 4 students at each center. And I group students based on their academic level, but also I take into consideration things such as behavior and cognitive level as well. Working at my English Language Arts Center with multiple students at a time can get a little tricky, especially when you're focusing on different skills. So what we like to do here is we love these Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks. And see, I have 3 different versions right here in front of me. I have real photos, fairy tales and superheroes, and just the standard Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks. I like to give one of these to a student and then work with the other student that needs the more targeted skill practice. And these are great for building work momentum as well as behavior momentum if you need it within the classroom. Um, here I was taking these off, but the students would just put the pepperonis on the pizza and turn the page and continue through the workbook, and this is a great practice skill as well as independent task. These Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks are available in the Autism Helper store on Teachers Pay Teachers. They also have digital versions in Boom Cards, which are amazing to use in the classroom as well. Another piece of curriculum that we use in my classroom is the Autism Helper Level Daily Curriculum. This is the language arts curriculum, and this is Level 1. These are amazing because there is a page of work for every single day of the school year. You have your year planned for you. This gives supplemental activities that you need to work on. There are data sheets in here, and there's a unit plan in here. Each unit comes with an anchor chart for your students, especially when, um, your students need a lot of visuals. These are very helpful and also increase that independence while your students are working. So here's an example of what the Level 1, um, Level Daily curriculum looks like. There's some tracing involved, and as they go through the book, they stop tracing, they start working on writing their own words and identifying letters and matching all the letters. This is an amazing curriculum to use in my classroom. Here I have the Reading Comprehension Level 1 Leveled Daily Curriculum for some of my students that need more reading comprehension practice. And this is a sample of a, an anchor chart. And then a supplemental activity you can use are the file folders. This is the Language Arts Level 1 Leveled Daily Curriculum. Again, if you have students that are working on different levels, you can give these to one student while you work with another student. And they're matching here, they're matching picture to picture, and here they're matching picture to word. So you can see that it's differentiated for your learners. Some examples of some supplemental activities that I do with my students, um, here's a Handwriting Activity Sheet where they highlight, they color, they rainbow write and box. They're just really practicing their coloring skills and writing skills. And we also use these amazing letter tubs, tactile letters, and letter books. For students who have mastered their letter identification and are learning words or sight words, I use sight word worksheets that incorporate fine motor skills. These are from The Positive Teacher, and these are from Keeping My Kiddos Busy. And this final material that we use at my ELA center, this is called Square Panda. This is an iPad app that we use, and you do need this base and the letter tiles with it, but this works on letter sounds, letter identification, rhyming, spelling words. It's amazing for our learners. So students place the letter in once they find it. There are several different games for it, um, but they just follow directions, play the game. It's fun, but they're learning at the same time. Thank you so much for watching. I'm going to add some links for our Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks in the comments, as well as our Level Daily Curriculum in the comments. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment. I will get back to you.
