Each week in my special education classroom we do cooking and craft extension activities related to our thematic unit. We have had a lot of fun over the years with all of our different projects!  I have found that  incorporating cooking activities into my special education classroom offers a hands-on approach to teaching essential skills including:...

I love October!! It is my favorite month. Fall is here 🍂, decorations are up🎃, and it's my birthday month 🎂!  October is also a fun time in the classroom. Each year we take a field trip to a farm for a petting zoo, pumpkin patch, and hayride! It is a great way to kick off the month.  It is one of my favorite months for our thematic units too. We finish our Apples Unit from September, then go into Fall & Leaves, and end the month with Halloween of course!  Click to find this unit in my TPT store! Click to find this unit in my TPT store! My favorite books for Halloween are Big Pumpkin and The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. One year on our hayride at the farm they did a "spooky storytime" and did the Little Old Lady with props. It was SO MUCH FUN! And was a great way to get the kids engaged.  Click to find this book unit in my TPT store! Click to find this book unit in my TPT store! Some fun Halloween crafts we have done was a group pumpkin pinat......

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......