It is very cool and I love it!
Are you ready?
I am trying to get ready. I have signed up for a couple of online professional development courses to help me better coordinate speech/language/social development to literacy skills in the classroom. Next week I will participate in SGM® Back to School Boot Camp. The topics in this workshop include sentence building to show narrative organization, art projects for character development and critical thinking related to perspective-taking and mental states.
During the past two weeks, I helped do a “Boosting Reading Comprehension” program at a local private school. It is interesting that no matter what I do, I end up learning as much, if not more, from my students than they do from me! It became clear on the first day that the 7th graders needed some Social Thinking® strategies before we could proceed further with reading comprehension. I was not prepared for that (but I should have been!!). I used the book Social Fortune, Social Fate by Michelle Garcia Winner and Pamela Crooke to introduce them to social behavior mapping and strategies like the “social fake”. I kept thinking, “Wow, I wish I had started with these kiddos way back in early elementary, but here we are
For more information about the book and Social Thinking® strategies go to http://socialthinking.com.
Jennifer Hatfield, at http://therapyandlearningservices.com, reminded me in a recent post, that reading practice does not have to be reading a book.
So, my sweet second grader and I had lots of fun with games –
Spot It! Words is soooo much fun. Players match pic to pic, pic to word, or word to word. Lots of processing there! Another fun game that we loved is Specific Word Finding by Sublime Speech –
Available in Danielle Reed’s store at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com.
It has been a wonderful summer and I will miss the lazy days.
Best,
Robin
