This Week's Theme and Song

I always use the last week of the month as a review week. This week we'll be using "Halloween" as our theme. We'll be reviewing the themes from the past 3 weeks; witches, spiders and pumpkins.

We'll be using association pairs to teach both math and language concepts. You can use whatever themes you've been doing. My associations look like this:

1. witch and broom
2. pumpkin and jack-o-lantern
3. spider and web

We'll match these pictures together on our felt board while we sing the following song to the tune of "Farmer in the Dell".

HALLOWEEN REVIEW SONG:

"It's Halloween tonight! It's Halloween tonight! Oooo-ooooo it's Halloween, it's Halloween tonight!" (Put up letters to spell: Halloween)

"The witch rides her broom! The witch rides her broom! Oooo-ooooo it's Halloween, the witch rides her broom!" (Match witch to broom)

"The pumpkin's glowing bright! The pumpkin's glowing bright! Oooo-ooooo it's Halloween, the pumpkin's glowing bright!" (Match pumpkin to jack-o-lantern)

"The spider spins her web! The spider spins her web! Oooo-ooooo it's Halloween, the spider spins her web!" (Match spider and web)

*You can change the words of the song to fit the associations you use. You can also add more versus and more associations depending on the attention span of your child.

For Your Health Fridays

Today's recipe took me quite awhile to perfect. I had to come up with a chicken nugget recipe that was gluten-free, casein-free, soy-free, corn-free, egg-free and low oxalate. I had to make sure the recipe was good enough for my kids not on special diets as well. After a lot of trial and error, this is the recipe we love.

Coconut flour absorbs a lot of moisture, bakes well and has a natural sweetness that my kids love. It's also a great source of fiber. It's kind of expensive but a little goes a long way.

Serve these chicken bites with a little sugar-free ketchup (Organicville is my favorite brand) and a side of fruit and veggies and you've got a wonderful, healthy meal. If you try this recipe out, let me know what you think!

GF/CF Sweet and Savory Chicken Bites

3/4 cup sweet rice flour
3 Tablespoons coconut flour
1/2 teaspoon paprika
3/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon oregano
1/4 teaspoon basil
3 Tablespoons grapeseed oil
4 free-range organic chicken breasts
extra grapeseed oil

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees. In a bowl, combine all the ingredients except the oil and chicken. Then place the mixed ingredients in a food processor. Add the oil and pulse until all the oil is evenly distributed. Set aside. Prepare your chicken breasts by rinsing them with cool water and cutting them into thumb-size pieces. Cut diagonally to make them more tender. Place the cut chicken in a bowl and drizzle with grapeseed oil, lightly coating. Toss the chicken in the oil and distribute evenly. Add the crumb mixture and toss. Place the chicken pieces on a cookie sheet lined with bleach-free parchment paper. Bake at 325 for 25 minutes. Turn the chicken bites once half-way through the baking. Serve immediately.

Pumpkin Book Picks

#1. Pumpkin Pumpkin, by Jeanne Titherington


I love this book because the illustrations are beautiful and the story is simple. It's a great story to read before carving those pumpkins! It tells the story of a pumpkin from planting the seed to carving it. For more information and a peek inside this delight of a book click here.

Here's a cute poem to go along with this story. Here is an easy song to sing with it.

#2. The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, by Linda Williams


I've never met a child who didn't like this book. It's illustrations are wonderful and the story is repetitious. It's spooky with a lovely ending. The children can interact with you as you read this book and make the sound effects of each of the sounds the lady hears. It's one of our family's personal favorites. Check this one out, you won't be dissappointed!

For an activity to go along with this book click here. I printed this out on cardstock, colored it, cut out the pieces, and had my son match them as we read. This worked great as a way to keep him engaged and focused. Here is an alternative version of the same pictures.

Pumpkin Sponge Craft

As we discussed earlier, retention of information occurs best when repetition is used. If you are planning a trip to the pumpkin patch, prepare your child by reading the book mentioned in the last post. Any story about how pumpkins grow will do.

After you visit the pumpkin patch, complete an activity that reinforces what your child saw or participated in. An example of this type of activity is the Pumpkin Sponge Craft outlined below. Hang the artwork where your child will see it and talk about the experience every now and then.

Materials Needed:
1. Construction Paper or Art Paper in white or black
2. Tempera Paints or Craft Paints (washable preferred) in orange and green
3. Sponge

Cut the sponge into a rough pumpkin shape (shown below). Dip the sponge flat down in the orange paint. Sponge paint as many pumpkins as you like. Then take your pointer finger and dip it in the green paint. Create a stem on each pumpkin with your fingerprint. This activity is simple and beneficial. Sponging and pressing with the pointer finger practices good grasp techniques and finger isolation.




Create a pumpkin patch during the day using white paper (seen above) or a pumpkin patch at night using black paper (see below). Add additional details such as vines, jack-o-lantern faces, etc. depending on the attention span of your child.



Here are some other fun pumpkin activities:

Printable Pumpkin Dot-to-Dot with Clifford

Printable Pumpkin Maze with Clifford

Pick a Pumpkin Book and Virtual Jack-o-Lantern

Pumpkin Centerpiece

This Week's Theme

This week's theme is: Pumpkins!

This is a great week to make it to the pumpkin patch if you haven't already done so. A great book to read before going to the Pumpkin Patch is:

A Day at the Pumpkin Patch by Megan Faulkner

For more information and a sneak peek at the pictures in this amazing book click here.


Here is the lesson plan for circle time this week. I always do my "pumpkin week" lesson plan around the poem, "5 Little Pumpkins". It's a cute poem and is great for reinforcing rhyming words and counting. For a link to DTLK's printable poem and visuals click here. There's even a mini-book to go along with the poem here. All you have to do is print them, cut them out, put a little velcro or magnet on the back and your circle time visuals are done. (To make them last year after year, laminate them or cover them with contact paper.)

For Your Health Fridays

Why am I posting a recipe on a homeschooling blog? The answer is simple. One of the main reasons I homeschool my son is because of his extreme sensitivity to foods and the difficulty his diet poses. Every time I have attempted to put my son in a classroom, his eating issues have been a huge problem and he has regressed. In homeschooling him I am control of when he eats, what he eats and I can document how he reacts to what I am feeding him. In addition, I can spare him the torture of watching other kids eat what he wishes he could.

When I plan meals for my son I try to maximize the nutritional content of everything he is eating. My entire family is not on the same diet, so I often modify meals so that everyone can enjoy them. The following recipe is free of all of my son's most severe allergies: gluten, casein, soy, egg, nuts, potatoes and corn. Despite what it doesn't have, it's really healthy and really tasty. The directions are for a slow-cooker but if you don't have one, you can make it in a pot. It's one of my daughter's favorites.

Hamburger Soup with Pasta

1 lb. lean grass-fed ground beef or kosher ground turkey
1 chopped yellow onion
1 large can stewed tomatoes
2 cups vegetable broth
1 cup baby carrots sliced into coins
1 cup chopped celery
2 cups cooked brown rice pasta (in spirals or elbow or bow-tie, not spaghetti)
Salt
Pepper

Directions: In a frying pan, crumble the ground beef or turkey. Add chopped onion. Cook until meat is browned. Add to a crock pot (slow cooker). Then add the can of stewed tomatoes and broth. Next add your carrots and celery. Cook on high for 3 hours or until carrots are tender.

Just before serving cook the brown rice pasta according to directions. Drain. Add to the soup. Serve. Enjoy!

Variations:

*If you don't have a gluten issue, you can use regular pasta.

*You can substitute a cup of diced potatoes for the pasta if you prefer.

*If you cook it on the stove top instead of a slow cooker, boil the soup until carrots are tender.

Printable Spider Craft

Here is another spider craft idea, courtesy of Lakeshore Learning.

Click here to view and print craft.

Activities for Book Picks

A great way to reinforce the literature you explore is to do a "hands on" activity along with the book. Remember: repetition is key! Here are some free activities to go along with this week's book picks.

Itsy Bitsy Spider Craft

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly Craft

The Very Busy Spider Coloring Page

Free Printable Halloween Book

I just got this free Halloween mini-book from Scholastic. It's great to use to reinforce language. You can modify it to work with your child's ability level.

Halloween Words Book

Spider Book Picks

Here are 3 of my favorite spider books:

#1. The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle
This is a great book for kids with special needs because it's repetitious. It also has a "lift the flap" feature which is entertaining. It is a little long for my son so we match farm animals that we have to the animals on the pages to keep him engaged.



#2. There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly by Pam Adams
This book has holes in the pages which you can look at the animals through. Although a spider isn't the main character, it's fun to have your child find the spider every time it's mentioned.



#3. The Itsy Bitsy Spider by Iza Trapani
This book is a song that you can sing to the tune of the familiar song it names. It is long for my son so we take a plastic spider and he "finds" the little spider on each page.



You should be able to find these 3 gems in your local library.

Spider Craft

Here is an idea for a simple spider craft.




Materials Needed:

black cardstock
hole punch
black pipe cleaners
googly eyes
gluestick

#1. Cut out a circle and a slightly smaller oval out of black cardstock


#2. Cut 2 pipe cleaners into 8 legs and punch 8 holes in the circle


#3. Attach the pipe cleaner legs, glue on the oval head and attach googly eyes


My girls are very girly so they put little bows on their spiders' heads. Decorate them however you wish and hang them on your wall.

Developmental Considerations: Depending on your child's ability level you can have your child punch the holes themselves to practice their grasp strength. You can also have your child pinch and twist the pipe cleaner legs practicing that pincer grasp. If your child is able, have them cut out the circle and oval.

Spider Lesson Photo

Here is the photo of the "spider" lesson we did today. As you can see, I used plastic spiders. The small spiders are simply spider rings with the ring cut off and velcro applied to the back. The large spider I got at a dollar store. The web is made out of white pipe cleaners with velcro attached to the back. The numbers are simply printed out from my computer, cut out and laminated. The foam letters I use have a hook and loop backing. You can buy this kind of letter here.

Circle Time - Lesson

The circle time lesson is a brief, instructional period where you introduce the theme. I teach the same lesson every day for one week. Repetition is critical for memorization. Research has shown that kids retain material better when they study a subject for short periods of time every day.

The theme for next week (in honor of the Halloween Holiday coming up) is "spiders". All week long I'll share with you what we do around this theme. Here is what my lesson plan for circle time looks like:



Just in case the lesson plan isn't enough, I'll take pictures of the lesson tomorrow and show you what it looks like. If you're not familiar with signs, you can find any sign you need to know. Here is the sign for spider.

Circle Time- Schedule

By this time you've figured out how to physically set up your circle time and you've picked a welcome song. Next, you need to plan your circle time schedule. The schedule should be the framework for how you will run circle time each day. A schedule is important because it will make circle time structured and predictable, reducing any behavior problems that might arise.

Here is my sample schedule:

1. Welcome Song
2. Brief Lesson
3. Song (around the theme)
4. Story (around the theme)

If you're doing circle time with a child with special needs you might consider making your schedule visual. This is an especially good idea if the child is low-verbal and is using PECS. Make your schedule visual by placing a picture representing each of the 4 parts listed above on a strip of paper. You can point to each picture as you go through circle time and teach your child what the pictures represent.

Here is a sample visual schedule:



Keep in mind that you can arrange circle time however you wish - you're in charge! Just keep it simple, keep it brief, and keep it consistent.

Circle Time - Welcome Song

The first thing you'll need to start circle time is a welcome song. A welcome song is a song that you sing in the very beginning to start off the circle. It's a good idea to sing the same song every day, if you can. The repetition is great for kids with special needs. I also recommend some hand gestures to get non-verbal or low-verbal kids interacting right from the start. You can make up whatever hand gestures you want, just keep it simple and keep it the same, every day.

Here's one of my favorite welcome songs:

#1. "The Hello Song" click here to print the sheet music and hear the song for free.

I sing the song exactly as it is written except for the line that says, "to share with us our primary day". I change that line to match the weather. When we come to this line we look out the window and fill in whatever the weather is for the day. On a sunny day we'll sing, "to share with us on a bright sunny day". On a rainy day we sing, "to share with us on a cold rainy day". You get the picture.

What are your favorite welcome songs?

Circle Time- Set Up

Just about every day my kids and I get together for circle time. We sit in a circle in front of a white board, chalk board or felt board. Around a theme we sing songs, read books or do various activities. The whole process takes from 15-20 minutes. After circle time we complete the craft for the day which is under the same theme.

Although circle time is great for all toddlers and young school-age kids, this time is really valualable for my son. We focus on language, imitation and turn-taking skills. If you have more than one child, it's a great way to form relationships and practice appropriate behavior. Doing this with one child is different, but can still be a lot of fun.

I'll spend the next couple of days talking about how to plan circle time for your family. First on the agenda is set-up. What does circle time look like? Here are the two ways we set it up:

We either sit in chairs in front of an easel:



Or on colored mats on the floor:




Get your wheels turning, how you will set circle time up?

Reading Tip #1

If you have a special needs child that loves to read, congratulations! My son loved to read as a young toddler, in fact he was infatuated with it. But as he sank into the world of Autism (around age 2 1/2 -3) he lost his language and his love for reading. The world became a puzzle to him and he no longer understood what we said. It's been a rough road the past four years, trying to get him to understand and appreciate language.

One of the things we struggle with is how to motivate him to read. I've discovered an easy way to entreat him. I make the books we read - any book we read - interactive. That is, I find something to use to get him physically involved in the book. In order to better explain this concept, I've posted an example.

Let's take a look at the book, "Rain" by Robert Kalan. This book is one of my personal favorites because it's so simple and easy to work with. My kids have loved it as well. You can find it in your local library or buy a paperback version for about $7.



This book's theme is about colors. I gathered some unifix cubes I happened to have in a rainbow of colors. If you didn't have blocks you could use colored paper or beads or buttons.


Then I set the book out on the floor and we read it. Each time the book mentions a color, we look for it in the picture and match a colored block to it.

It becomes an easy "hide and seek" game.

At the end we made a rainbow out of the blocks.

Try it and let me know if it works for you too! Have any other great ideas to encourage reading? Leave me a comment!

Simple Pumpkin Craft

Years ago, when I first starting taking my son to preschool, I didn't understand why the school did so many seasonal crafts. At the time my son didn't have a clue what holidays were for or about and I felt it was a waste of time. Since then, I have seen the error in that way of thinking.

Studying holidays and how we celebrate them is really "Social Studies". Though your child might not understand why we have holidays right now, he/she will need to understand them as they get older. Much of what goes on in our society revolves around the seasons and the holidays.

There are lots of ways to incorporate seasonal traditions into your curriculum. One of the easiest ways to do this is with simple crafts. From an "occupational therapy" standpoint, these types of crafts are vital. Doing simple crafts allows your child a fun way to practice cutting, pasting, coloring, etc. These skills strengthen hand grasp and prepare your child for writing.

When picking a craft for your child, think: simple. Don't overwhelm your child with too many steps. Try to limit the craft to 15 minutes from start to finish. Have an example of the finished craft for them to look at, if you can.

We did a simple pumpkin craft today. We were focusing on the pincer grasp (thumb to pointer finger). I have my typical children do the crafts along with my son to provide good modeling and because they enjoy it!

Hint: you can buy pre-cut tissue paper squares at Lakeshore Learning. They're cheap and they've lasted me for years. I use them all the time!

You will need:
orange and green construction paper
black, orange and green tissue paper cut into squares
glue stick

1. Cut out two shapes: an uneven oval out of orange construction paper, and a rectangle out of green construction paper:

2. Glue the stem to the pumpkin.

3. Instruct the child to "pinch" the tissue paper sqaures like this:

4. Instruct the child to glue and "push" the tissue paper onto the matching color.

5. The finished project:

Structure

Most children thrive on structure. This is also true for kids with special needs. Stress and fear can be dramatically reduced when there are tools in place that create repetition and predictability. The first thing I did to create a feeling of order for my son was to give him a working schedule.

A "working schedule" refers to a schedule that can be changed from day to day. The first thing I did was lay out my design. My child can only handle about four different activities a day. I also created a space for a changeable reinforcer (or reward) that he can work toward every day.



Next I placed a card for the day of the week. This helps my son not only learn the days of the week, but see that the schedule changes according to the days.



Lastly, I give my son a star (or a token) for each accomplished activity. When all the spaces for tokens are filled up, he gets the reinforcer that he has been working for.



I place this schedule on a wall in a place that he walks by frequently. The schedule makes it easier for me to deal with behavior problems. When my son cries or is upset because he doesn't want to finish the activity, I show him the schedule and remind him what he is working for. Although it works like a charm most days, it's not always easy. There are some days he loves his schedule because he really wants the reinforcer. Other days things are difficult and he wants everything on the schedule to go away. On those days I often find him stuffing his schedule under the sofa. That's okay, at least he's communicating how he's feeling!

Note: a schedule and a reinforcer/reward of some kind works really well to keep typical kids motivated too. Modify the schedule board according to the ability level of your child.