When I first started teaching, I did not have a curriculum. I didn't have anything really. So each week I was recreating the wheel trying to find something to use to target common elementary skills and IEP goals. It was EXHAUSTING! And extremely time-consuming. Eventually, I discovered if I chose a theme for each week it made planning easier and instruction more cohesive. As I repeated themes year after year, I was able to accumulate a variety of activities so I would keep the same theme for longer than a week. Typically 2-4 weeks would be just right.  For each theme, I had some predictable activities with the same format that I would just modify to match that week's theme. As any successful special educator knows, predictability can be so important in our classroom! This allowed my students to learn the content without simultaneously needing to learn the activity expectations.  Vocabulary: Students chose vocabulary words from a bag to match to the corresponding pictures on my......

Can you believe it is already March? It shocks me every year! In our classroom, there has always been two big celebrations each March... Read Across America Day and St. Patrick's Day.  Our focus each year for Read Across America is Green Eggs and Ham. In my first year of teaching, this was a favorite of one of my students with limited communication. He just LOVED the book and had memorized each page. We all loved to have him read it to us because it was so wonderful to hear him say so much! So from that point on Green Eggs and Ham has always been a mainstay in my room. Over the years, I added more and more activities that we could do with the story so that we could address IEP goals and meet all the needs of my students including practicing vocabulary and building sentences using a communication board, velcro pieces, or our trusty classroom GoTalk! I also created lots of comprehension activities so that I had something that fit the needs of each student. We worked on wh-questions, ......