Community Helpers: Project-Based Learning

This year, my school district implemented Project-Based Learning (PBL) as everyone's professional development project for the year.  If you're not familiar with Project Based Learning, it's a teaching approach that's very student-driven rather than teacher-driven, and students explore a real world problem/challenge/question of their choosing while exploring possible solutions through various methods-- research, collaboration, etc...

An excerpt from Edutopia explains it in a little more detail:

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"PBL is the ongoing act of learning about different subjects simultaneously. This is achieved by guiding students to identify, through research, a real-world problem (local to global) developing its solution using evidence to support the claim, and presenting the solution through a multimedia approach based in a set of 21st-century tools.

Kids show what they learn as they journey through the unit, interact with its lessons, collaborate with each other, and assess themselves and each other. They don't just take a test or produce a product at the end to show their learning."

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I implemented PBL by acting as support for one of my preschool teachers in a Community Helpers project in her classroom-- "What do I want to be when I grow up?" was our driving question that began PBL! (Every PBL starts with the "driving question.")

We split the kids up into small groups during PBL week based on their chosen occupations.  The kids ended up choosing to be doctors, firefighters, police officers, bakers/chefs, engineers, and astronauts.  The teacher and I loaded up our library cards with books about each occupation so the kids could start their research on their chosen occupation!

I took the doctor group, and we started researching what a doctor does by looking through books, watching videos, and exploring through apps.  I also had a doctor kit out so we could explore the tools a little more!

• Virtual Field Trip to a hospital
• Interactive Book: Pediatrician 
• Calillou's Check Up App:

From those videos, we learned about what doctors do, why they are important, what they wear, where they work, and what tools they use.  Each student drew pictures of what they learned, using these booklets that you can download on TpT here.

The tools are from the play doctor kit that was picked up for pennies at a yard sale!

After completing the booklets, the kids decided on a project they wanted to make to represent their chosen occupations.  In my doctor group, the chosen projects were doctor bags, an otoscope, and an x-ray.  These are the finished projects.. They turned out pretty cute!

I will say that I have even MORE respect for teachers after doing this project.  Within my doctor group, I had 2 kids with language delays, one peer model, and another student on an IEP for other needs besides communication. My one language student just needed some prompts to recall some of the information, but was pretty on task overall and could complete the drawings in her booklet independently.  The other student on my caseload needs significant wait time along with cuing to come up with answers.  She also says "I can't" or "I don't know how" during any activity that involves drawing, and won't attempt it unless she's walked step by step through how to draw it.  The peer model in the group FLEW through everything, and the other student not on my caseload needed a lot of prompting and cuing to stay on task.  It was such a struggle to feel like I was being effective and meeting the needs of everyone in the group, since they were all at *COMPLETELY* different levels.  I can't imagine what this feels like in a classroom of 23 students of all varying levels!

Overall, though, I'd say our PBL project was a success! We had to provide a little more guidance than what is probably *supposed* to happen for PBL, but when you work in a special needs preschool program, you have to adapt! After making their projects, we recorded short video clips of all the students talking about what they want to be when they grow up, what that job involves, what tools they use, where they work, and what they made for their project.

Does your school do Project Based Learning? If so, what projects have you done/helped with?

Green Eggs & Ham craftivity

Last week during our jungle/wild animal theme, I attempted a hippopotamus craft that ended up being a Pinterest fail-- thankfully, a new craftivity I have planned for Dr. Seuss week turned out much more successful! :)

I love, love, love the book, Green Eggs And Ham.  I've done craftivities for Cat In The Hat and One Fish, Two Fish, but haven't done one for Green Eggs and Ham yet!  Third year's a charm, right? :)

Just cut out a pan from black construction paper, and cut out some cooked egg-shaped pieces from green construction paper and you are good to go!

I found the idea here, and thought of some ways to adapt it for speech! I did artic words on this example, but there are plenty of other ways to use this, too.

Since frying pans are hot when you're cooking, I thought it would be great to tie in the concept of hot/cold for some of my little ones.  I also made pictures for sorting by category (breakfast foods vs dinner foods) to glue onto the eggs. Grab those pictures HERE.

My plan is to draw a line across the middle of the pan to divide the two categories, and then have them glue their hot item/cold item eggs and breakfast/dinner foods onto the pans in the correct spots (ie glue the eggs with hot items on the top part of the pan, and the eggs with pictures of cold items on the bottom part of the pan).

You could also work on food vocabulary by gluing pictures of the items onto the eggs.  Work on following directions with spatial concepts using vocab or articulation pictures and this craft, too (telling them where to glue the eggs-- "above" one picture, "next to" another picture, etc...)


One of my other favorite crafts to do this week is with One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  I got the idea from Busy Bee Speech last year, from this great post full of ideas!  She used watercolor paint for her fishbowl, while I just used blue construction paper.  I've written speech words on the fish, and worked on spatial concepts with this craft, too (put two yellow fish on top, put a green fish under a purple fish, etc...).

What are some of your favorite crafts for Dr. Seuss week? Stay tuned for more Dr. Seuss ideas later this week!

Co-Teaching Tuesday: Pete the Cat in the PreK rooms!

I'm a day late with it, but here is the latest Co-Teaching Tuesday post!

For small groups in the preschool rooms during Pete week, I did a coloring activity that focused on vocabulary.  I used these coloring pages that I made from last year, where I printed a picture of Pete the Cat and wrote "I love my {color} shoes" above him.  I then printed/cut out black and white coloring page-type pictures of items that are the same color as the named shoe color, and glued the pictures all around the page before making copies.

 

For small groups, I had 3 brown bags, each containing pictures of the different colored items on the pages (i.e. 1 bag had the red items from the red shoe page, another bag had all blue items from the blue shoe page, etc...).

I had each kid take a turn drawing a picture out of one of the bags.  They had to tell me what it was and what color it was, and then whoever had that item on their page could color it.

This activity lent itself easily to working on a variety of other language targets, too!  We hit WH questions (i.e. "Who lives in a tree?" on the green page), categories (i.e. "What are some other fruits?" for apple on the red page), and functions ("What do you do with a banana?" on the yellow page).  We also did a little bit with basic concepts, like talking about fast vs slow animals when the turtle picture was pulled, named things that were hot vs cold when the sun was pulled, etc... The kids seemed to really like it!

Find all the other activities we did with Pete in speech by checking out this post!

Movin' Monday: Movin' & 'Groovin' with Pete the Cat!

Oh Pete.. who doesn't love Pete the Cat and his carefree, no stress, "it's all good" attitude? We love Pete here in preschool!

One of my goals this year is to do more activities where my kids are up and moving around while working on their speech/language goals, instead of sitting at a table.  A lot of my little ones have a really tough time sitting still for any length of time (and to be honest, I can't really blame them-- I sat in an inservice for 7ish hours last week, and while I loved the speaker and it was interesting, I know all of us SLPs were really struggling to stay focused and alert while in our seats!), so I wanted to try more activities with movement to keep them more engaged!

Anyway, I decided to kick-start my Movin' Mondays feature by sharing what we did a couple weeks ago to "move and groove" during Pete the Cat week!

(note his 'groovy buttons') :)

We did different activities based on what book we were using.  For the "Four Groovy Buttons" book, we used this big hand-drawn Pete and his buttons to work on following directions and simple basic concepts, like:

"Put the yellow button on top of the pink button"

"Move a green button to the bottom" 

"Put a small button next to a big button"

"Put the red button up high/down low"

You could also target same/different with 2 same/2 different color buttons!

For articulation, we went on a "button hunt" around the room.  

When they found a button, they had to say a speech word before moving on to find another button.  

MsJocelynSpeech has some cute button articulation packs on TpT, like this /k/ pack, and TeachSpeech365 has a "Button Bananza" following directions pack on TpT, as well, if you are looking for some other general button-themed activities!

We also used my "Snazzy Sneaker Articulation" pack on TpT that I made to use with my "back to school" activities.  They also went perfectly with the second Pete book, "I Love My White Shoes."
We played Memory with these cards, and went on a "shoe hunt" with these, too!

 What can I say? My preschoolers love hunting for any and everything!!

One thing I did to adapt the shoe cards to fit a language goal happened while I was with 2 students-- 1 was artic, while the other was working on using complete sentences with is/are.  I started off by having the one working on 'be' verbs hide the cards while I did some drill with the artic student.  The student working on articulation had to find a card, and bring it to the other student.  That student had to tell him "This is a ___" and name the item.  The artic kid then had to say the word 5x.  When they were done, I let them switch roles for hiding/finding.  It worked well and kept both engaged while working on two different goals simultaneously!

This book is also great to target associations/categories (i.e. things that are red, fruits, things that are blue, etc...).

What else did we do for Pete week?

"Rockin In My School Shoes" wonderful for some basic vocabulary (labeling) and object functions for preschool.  I found clipart for a variety of the pictures in the book (soccer ball, guitar, book etc...) and we used these pictures to play games for labeling objects and identifying object functions.

This book is also perfect for modeling short simple phrases/sentences for your increasing MLU kids.  I would model a sentence for them on each page and have them imitate (i.e. "Pete eats lunch" "Pete slides down" etc..).  This book in particular also lends itself well to inferencing and "where" questions!

The Harper Collins website has a Pete the Cat "Memory" game you can print off. I used this to model phrases/sentences, and also used this to target pronoun "He" and 'be' verbs (i.e. "He is sliding" "He is eating lunch" etc...).  I have also used this just as a general reinforcer activity!

Carrie's Speech Corner had some fun ideas for coloring pages that I used, as well.  Check out what other activities she used on her blog, too!

What are some of your favorite things to do with Pete the Cat? Stay tuned for tomorrow's "Co Teaching Tuesday" post for the Pete-themed activity I used in the prek classrooms during small groups!