Sensory Integration

SENSORY INTEGRATION

     ORTON GILLINGHAM

          MONTESSORI

               

Sensory Room is Good for ALL Students

The video that I linked above references students with autism specifically however, all students can benefit from using a sensory room to get their sensory needs met daily.  

Sensory integration is basically used to provide students with their sensory needs and then they are ready to learn.  Providing these sensory needs can release untold amounts of benefits for all students to be able to become more successful in the classroom.  Not everyone will have access to a sensory room so what do you do?

Teachers can provide flexible seating, physical activity during brain breaks, teach basic yoga moves, provide calming music in the background, and teach students some deep breathing exercises.  These are all very inexpensive ways to begin incorporating sensory techniques into your daily teaching schedule. 

Design a calming area in your classroom where any student can go at any time when they feel the need to calm themselves.  Provide soft seating, stuffed animals, lowered lighting, and a little bit of privacy and you have a calming area in your very own classroom.  

Sensory integration needs to include these three aspects: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.  When we provide students with opportunities to include these senses during their learning then their retention of that learning increases.  

When we take this a step further and also include things that are found in nature and our everyday lives, we increase the benefit of sensory integration.  Students are allowed to explore and learn at their own pace during their sensory time.  Real-world items also increase their social learning and imaginative play.  When children are playing, they are still learning if they are provided with good tools.  

I came away from reading about this subject wondering about how much time do we really invest in sparking our students' curiosity and realizing how important that this is to our students.

There are many inexpensive ways to begin using sensory type materials in your teaching.  By creating sensory bags containing hair gel & glitter, flour & water, glue & glitter, rice & beans, sand & marbles, etc.  The list of materials that you can use is only limited by your imagination.  

I encourage any teacher to try to integrate one new sensory activity into your classroom while teaching or before teaching and see what results you get from your students.  I know they will become more engaged and excited about....What are we going to do today?  That's always a great thing!

Thanks for reading,

Shannon

STEAM

STEAM - Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, & Math

STEAM is the way of future teaching to fully engage students in their learning.  This practice integrates science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.  Now, there is also a move towards integrating language arts into STEAM.  This practice supports project-based learning and gets students excited about learning while they do not even realize how many different aspects of learning is taking place.  Students are pushed to open their minds and create, innovate, and analyze their projects on their own or in groups.

STEAM activities do not have to cost a lot of money.  There are many resources available for free online and through the utilization of AMSTI products (provided by the state of Alabama) teachers can easily begin their exploration of incorporating STEAM activities into their teaching.  Teachers can also utilize and recycle found or common objects to facilitate STEAM projects.  You are only limited by your willingness to use your imagination and allowing your students to embrace an open-ended question to begin.

Language arts can be incorporated by introducing the project with a specific book that can be used to pose your problem to present to your students.  Students then can design, create, experiment, redesign, recreate, and reflect on their projects.  When students share their projects, they can share their successes and failures and how they ultimately found solutions to problems that arose along the way during the project.  This creates an atmosphere of higher-ordered thinking and learning.  

STEAM teaching is beneficial to all types of students.  Teachers can have their students keep STEAM journals to record their thoughts and findings throughout their work on their projects.  This teaches students to improve their writing skills but also teaches them how to reflect on their work and improve their ideas over a period of days.  

One cool project that I learned about during my research on this topic was how to make "map paper".  Tea-stained, good quality paper can be used to get students engaged in creating maps and recording information.  Students will always become more engaged when met with interesting materials that are new and different.  I plan to use this idea in my future classroom to have students participate in a study of maps, travel, and how to design, create, and successfully float a raft.  

Here are some book titles that could get you started with a STEAM project of your own.

THE LEMONADE WAR

JUNKYARD WONDERS

11 EXPERIMENTS THAT FAILED

THE MITTEN

THE GRUFFALO

ONE PLASTIC BAG

THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND

TWENTY-ONE ELEPHANTS

STEAM Night - What Fun!!!

As you can see in the video link listed above, hosting a STEAM night for your students and parents can expose them to the fun aspects of what STEAM really is and what it can accomplish in teaching.  This type of event will help teachers obtain support from the community to work together to increase STEAM supplies, activities, and volunteers.

Thanks for reading,

Shannon

Differentiation

Differentiation for Students

I think one of the most important things I learned from researching this topic is to be flexible.  To differentiate for all your students' demands for you to be flexible.  This skill is learned and must be practiced to become talented in this area.  The benefits of your flexibility as a teacher far outweigh the effort needed to learn how to embrace this idea.

Differentiating for students can be challenging but it can be accomplished.  When we embrace something called the "Goldilocks Principle", we can achieve success.

We must search, as teachers, for that "just right" mix of activities, assignments, and lessons that best help all our students succeed.  There are many different ways to achieve this goal.

For our low-performing students, we must provide added support that is hands-on and extremely engaging.  Allow students to use flipgrid to share their thoughts instead of having them always write their ideas down on paper.  Provide support visually with anchor charts and socially through think alouds with the other students.  By just adding a few new strategies to your daily teaching you can increase your differentiation level little by little and see almost immediate results.

For grade-level performing students, you must challenge them at their level.  My biggest piece of advice here is to just not forget about them.  They are performing at the level they need to be for their grade.  That's great!  What can you do to teach them more?  How can you change things up to challenge them to learn just above their comfort zone?  These students are often forgotten or overlooked because they are meeting average expectations.  Let's not forget them and push them to learn more.

For high-performing students, you can easily challenge these students with open-ended questions and projects.  Don't just hit them with busy work!  Find out what they are individually interested in most and provide time and resources for each one of them to explore these areas of learning.  Let them help others if they want to but do not rely on them to become tutors for all the other students.  Allow them to work on "passion projects" that speak to them.  Group like-minded students together and assign them a research project that can be shared with the whole class at a specified time.  The students producing the project will benefit and the whole class will benefit.  A win-win!!!

VOKI app link

Voki is a tool that students can use to create presentations on different subjects.  Avatars, voiceovers, images, videos, and many other options are available to students when creating their presentations.  Students will only be limited by their imaginations when using this tool.  I learned about this tool during my research on this subject and I look forward to using it in my classroom to allow each student or strategically-grouped students to create and compose on their levels and then share with the whole class.  Students love to share their work with each other.

There are so many other ways to differentiate for students that I have not mentioned here and it does not take much research to find new ideas and resources to begin.

USE STATIONS

TARGET DIFFERENT SENSES

JOURNALING

LITERATURE CIRCLES

GROUP SIMILAR LEARNING STYLES TOGETHER

PROVIDE OPEN-ENDED PROJECTS

RELATE MATH TO THE REAL WORLD

Most of all, BE FLEXIBLE!!!

Set high expectations for yourself and your students!

Thanks for reading,

Shannon

Active Learning Strategies

Active Learning Strategies

Active learning strategies are used to increase the engagement of students and make them active participants in their daily learning.  If they see, they forget.  If they hear, they remember.  If they do, they understand.  90% more is learned and understood from students actively doing their learning.  Active learning is involving students in their learning in ways that increase their comprehension and absorption of content and skills.  The uses in the classroom are numerous but some examples are grouping students strategically in pairs or groups, helping them discover their own prior knowledge about a subject, increasing movement throughout lessons, and finally introducing ways to check for understanding throughout the lessons.  Think, Pair, Share is a great strategy to begin using if you are new to the idea of active learning.  Students are encouraged to think about the topic, pair with another student to talk about the topic, and then ultimately share with each other and/or the whole group their thoughts about the topic.  

This leads us to a very valuable tool that you can easily introduce to your teaching.  Signal cards!  By using signal cards, you can quickly assess how the lesson is going, where your students are in their understanding, and then you, as a teacher, will know where to go next in the lesson.  Students can quickly grasp the idea of communicating how they are feeling about their understanding when given just a couple of choices to express their opinion.  Signal cards also empower students to feel as if they have ownership of their learning along with their peers and the teacher.  You can also use a graphic organizer that contains 3 columns to assess students throughout your lessons and after the lessons.  When those columns are labeled as follows:  What I Knew, What I Know, What I Still Want To Know.  This allows for assessment to take place before, during, and after instruction.  This technique allows the teacher to get a great amount of information about how the students are thinking and whether the lesson that was taught was successful.  This is then used to drive future instruction.  

Something I learned about this subject that I did not know is that learning journals can be very good at teaching students about reflecting on their learning and when students write those thoughts down they internalize that information and begin to understand how to set goals to improve.

Learning journals can be used in any subject area on a regular basis.  

Math Journals At Work

 Thanks for reading,

Shannon

Student Led Conferences & Digital Portfolios

Student Led Conferences & Digital Portfolios

Student led conferences are exactly what they sound like.  Students lead their parents, teachers, administrators, and other observers through an exploration of their best work that they want to showcase for everyone to see.  Creating the material needed for a student led conference involves the student choosing their best work and organizing it in a way that best shows their abilities and growth.  This exercise helps students learn to set and organize goals and teaches students how to become leaders in their own learning.  Teachers act as facilitators and coaches when assisting the student with preparing their conference material to share.  Teachers can easily provide rubrics and guidelines of what should and needs to be included in their conferences.  Also, teachers can provide a scripted guide to help students remember what points to share during their conferences.  Students will take ownership of their learning and be proud to show their work samples of their best work that they have had the opportunity to choose to include.

In the first image above you can see how proud the student is to share their work during a student led conference.  This activity gives the student a sense of pride and empowerment about their accomplishments.  In the second image is an example of how a digital portfolio might be used to organize a student led conference.  Almost looks like a website for the student, right?  That's the idea.  The student organizes their work and showcases that work and their learned skills about how to produce and publish that work.  Privacy issues can be avoided by making all digital portfolios private so that parents, students, and teachers are still protected.

Whether student led conferences are driven by physical work samples or digital portfolios, parents become more involved and engaged in actually knowing what their children are learning and to what degree they are growing in that learning.  These conferences are also a great way for students to share their individual interests with others.  One of the greater benefits of digital portfolios is that they can be linked from year to year and progress can be compared.  When digital portfolios are begun as early as Kindergarten or 1st grade, growth is easy to observe and goal setting becomes easier to teach to students.  This goal setting ability goes beyond setting accelerated reading goals into goals in any and all areas.  Specifically, students can become much more engaged in subjects that spark their interest by setting goals in those areas.  Also, when digital portfolios are built they are much easier to share with extended family and friends that are interested in that student's progress.

Bring student work to life! link

There are many apps and websites to help you and your students get started with digital portfolios that are super easy to use.  Freshgrade.com is a great resource that is featured in the short video linked above.  It offers personalization to students, a learning journal for students to record their thoughts and ideas, and the use of diverse media.  This app also allows teachers to evaluate students' portfolios and offer suggestions on improvement and/or changes to make directly to the student through the portfolio.

Whether you decide to use physical work samples or a digital portfolio for your student led conferences, these practices are highly successful in improving each student's motivations.  Students take ownership of their work, learn how to reflect on what they have learned, become more motivated to learn, and will ultimately assist their teachers in setting higher expectations for themselves.

Thanks for reading,

Shannon

Coding and Robotics

CODING AND ROBOTICS

Coding in Kindergarten link

Coding and robotics sound like complicated subjects to teach.  Right?  
However, when you take a look at the advancements that have been made in the techniques to use to teach these subjects to younger and younger students, the value of these subjects being taught is obvious and can be extremely engaging and fun.  The enthusiasm of the teacher in the video definitely adds to the students' excitement about the lesson content but what is so important to me about this video is that the students are learning about coding and robotics without knowing that they are actually learning some extremely complicated content.   

By teaching coding and robotics content to younger students, the stigma of difficulty of this content can be removed almost completely.  Mistakes are celebrated and encouraged because coding can always be corrected to become successful and robotics can be redesigned to make a better end project.  When we find any type of content to teach where we can encourage failure then we are teaching our students to make their best effort and to learn from their errors and persevere.  These are important skills to learn.

Using tools like BeeBots, Ozobots, and others like these, students are learning early in life that coding and robotics are fun and easy.  The cost of these tools can become expensive but there are many companies that offer opportunities for discounts and even grants that can be applied for to obtained these tools for your classroom, grade level, and/or school.  A little bit of work and research could pay off in big results by being able to have these items in your classroom.  As an adult, coding and robotics sounds scary and difficult. What I learned from my research about this subject is that teaching these skills at a younger age demystifies the scary parts of this content and makes it seem so much easier.  

Once students have had an opportunity to be exposed to simple coding tools, teachers will be able to integrate coding and robotics skills into other areas of instruction.  Cross subject integration is always beneficial to any classroom.  By using a clear plastic grid with a Bee-bot device, lessons can be taught in science, math, language arts, and phonics to increase engagement, learning, and overall classroom participation and success.  Teachers and students are only limited by their imagination in ways to use these activities and tools.  

I learned that KIBO is a great screen-free robot kit that is a great beginner tool to use with younger students to begin their robot building career.  Students are able to design, create, and bring to life their own robots.  Then, they can code their robots using their freshly learned coding skills. 

There is simply no limit to how coding and robotics can enrich the everyday classroom experience!

 As always, thanks for reading!

Shannon

Social and Emotional Learning and Conscious Discipline

Social and Emotional Learning / Conscious Discipline

Social and Emotional Learning can be defined simply as teaching children how to recognize, manage, and utilize their emotions and feelings accurately and appropriately.  These skills are necessary to students being able to learn how to solve problems and establish good solid relationships with other students, teachers, and family members.  Good social and emotional learning benefits students in many ways.  Students use this type of learning to develop good life skills that will literally last a lifetime.  The investment of time to teach in this area is well worth the effort.  As the graphic above notes, there are several areas that intersect when teaching social and emotional learning.  Empathy improves students ability to interact well with others.  Good decision making and boosted self esteem improves learning for all in the classroom.  Motivation and commitment from students and teachers to this type of learning improves the overall atmosphere in the classroom for learning and a feeling of community.  Finally, interpersonal awareness of how one's social skills and emotions affects others begins each student on a path to discovering how to manage themselves without constant supervision of their behaviors.  Good decisions begin here...

This point leads us to the explanation of Conscious Discipline.  Conscious discipline can be used to bring the student and teacher to the same level of communication.  Teachers can begin using this technique simply by teaching students how to stop what they are doing, take a deep breathe and relax, and then think about how and why they are feeling what they are feeling.  Conscious discipline encourages and teaches ways to self-correct, calm one's self, and begin to learn how to analyze their own feelings and realize that each individual has a choice as to how to react to their feelings.  

By taking the time and effort to use this technique with students, a teacher can increase their own personal connection with each student and gain their trust.  Teachers can also increase the problem-solving abilities of each student and also be able to increase the safety in their classroom.  When students learn about their emotions and actions and how to control them, the classroom becomes a much safer environment in which to live, learn, and share.  This is truly worth the time and effort to teach and model for students and the only thing this will cost you is a little bit of time and focused energy.

Conscious Discipline link 

When utilizing the techniques mentioned here today, teachers should realize that the time spent on these subjects is well worth it.  As you can see in the video linked above, a teacher realized that giving 10-12 minutes from her day of teaching to using these strategies increased the overall learning in her classroom.  She is also reaping rewards of knowing that she is teaching her students skills that they are taking with them throughout their lives.  

By using simple daily routines like morning meetings where students can check in about how they are feeling, the teacher can share a rundown of the routine for the day and share any changes for that day, and students can exercise their speaking and listening skills with each other, a teacher can increase community in their classroom.

There are so many simple ways to begin using these ideas.  One idea that I really plan to use from the video is where the teacher led the students in a calming activity.  She led them through a breathe in a positive thought and shake out a negative thought.  For example, breathe in calm and shake out worry before a test.  By using a verbal and physcial aspect in this activity most students can be engaged in the idea of calming their minds for their test ahead of them. 

The benefits of social and emotional learning and conscious discipline can be endless.  The high points of using these strategies are increased assertiveness in students, a great way to encourage struggling students, and a way to teach emotionally weak students to learn how to remain composed or to regain their composure.  Teachers will also benefit because students will learn empathy for others, how to make better choices throughout their day, and consequences become less and less a part of the focus of each day.  

Thank you for reading my blog and until next time,

Shannon

Book Trailer - Punia and the King of the Sharks

Punia and the King of the Sharks

Charlotte's Web

Written by E.B. White

Illustrated by Garth Williams

Harper & Brothers Publishers

Copyright 1952

192 pages

Genre: Traditional Literature

A/R Level : 4.4

This is a classic tale of friendship between several different characters.  Fern, the little girl and Wilbur, the pig and also later in the book Wilbur's close relationship and bond with Charlotte, the spider.  There are many other characters that play a secondary role in this story and exhibit character traits of friendship.

We read this book with our class recently in practicum as a teacher read aloud.  Then we took a field trip to the Birmingham Children's Theatre to view the play, Charlotte's Web.  I feel like this was a great way to introduce the students to a great piece of literature and expose them to a dramatic version of the story also.

Poetry - Dirt on My Shirt

Dirt on My Shirt

Written by Jeff Foxworthy

Illustrated by Steve Bjorkman

Harper Collins Publishers

Copyright 2008

32 pages

Genre: Poetry
A/R Level: 3.9

This book of poems are very entertaining and funny.  Most of the poems are short and engaging.  Each page is illustrated well and will capture the students’ attention right away.  The topics covered in the poem range from family relationships, friendship, outdoors, pets and many more. 

I believe I will use this book in my classroom to initiate transitions and brain breaks.  This would be especially good to use when students have been working and on task for a while and they just need to  get up and move around a little, take a break from their thinking and then get back on task pretty quickly.  

Naughty Mabel Sees It All Book Talk

Naughty Mabel Sees It All