So far all assessments and evaluations have gone fabulous. People around campus keep telling me how much they are going to miss having me around when December creeps upon us, which is definitely a nice feeling.
Today was especially fabulous. I created a lesson plan for cursive handwriting with a focus on the letter 'w'. The 'under curve' seems to be difficult for our children, and since most of our lowercase cursive letters are constructed using the under curve, I decided to work on a letter that has three of them (if you count the optional initial stroke, which isn't taught everywhere).
So today's handwriting lesson was "Wonderfully Wacky Woven Web Wednesday." Some of you probably saw on my
facebook status that I was practicing and creating a model this weekend for the children to see as they created their webs. We started with wax paper and Elmer's glue and made cursive lowercase
Ws all over the wax paper. Then I asked the students to draw lines to make the
Ws connect - straight, curvy, etc. to make the shape of a spider's web. We followed up the web creation with
iridescent glitter and then stuck little black
cardstock spiders in our webs and put them in the window sill to let them dry. The idea is, once dry, the webs, which dry clear, can be peeled off the wax paper and will have a sparkly almost glow-in-the-dark feel and be a bit rubbery. We'll hang them up for Halloween decor along with the sign the kids made to go with them, written in cursive, which say "Wonderful Wacky Woven Webs". The kids listened well and worked so hard on their webs - and they had a lot of fun. The webs came out really cute, and tomorrow I'm letting them add some eyes or a red hourglass to their spiders in glitter before we hang everything up. I have to toot my own horn a bit and say it was one of my most creatively thought up lessons thus far. I was ecstatic that the kids loved the activity. I'll take some pictures tomorrow once the webs are dry. I can't post the ones with the kids, but I'll get some of just the webs alone. I'm very proud of my munchkins!
I also got to work with our sign language student again today - he is learning so quickly, he'll pass my ASL abilities up in no time. He's doing his spelling words now by sign (seeing the sign, hearing the word, then using fridge magnets to spell the word). We're trying to get him to make the signs himself, but his agility isn't quite there. He's certainly trying though.
This evenings top story; however,is that I have finally learned the purpose of the zipper, as of today. Our speech path intern and I really get along and talk a lot during our lunchtime. He told me this great story he wanted to share. He had a student with three items pictured on cards in front of him, with the objective of the lesson being to identify the commonality among the items pictured. He had a zipper, a button, and a snap on the pictures in front of him - the commonality being 'fasteners on clothing.' The student was mulling it over in his head and was quite puzzled so the
SLP asked him to tell out loud what he was thinking in his head so the
SLP could help. The student replied, "Well, I know the button is, like, for a button-up shirt. This [snap] thing is on top of jeans. And the zipper is on your pants so you can put 'it' in and pull 'it' out...." I should mention the student has four brothers :) So in case you ever want to know why we have zippers on our clothing....just ask our kids!!!
