Carpet Squares & Wigglebottom Response Activities

One of my favorite books is My Teacher Likes to Say... by Denise Brennan-Nelson. It's all about idioms like "ants in your pants" and what they mean. My little guys, especially the ones with autism, struggle with non-literal language and this book is perfect for explaining those common phrases! Last week a boy literally twisted his tongue with his fingers when I said "tongue twister" in another story. This meant it was perfect time to read this story. I make the book fun by acting out the phrases. It makes them giggle! So little genius boy was being quite the clever one again! I was explaining that "two heads are better than one" doesn't mean you need to grow an extra head and we can't really have two heads. And of course Little Genius (very politely) corrected me and said "unless you are one of those babies who is born stuck together. Then you can have two heads because it's two people stuck together." I don't know if I mentioned how old he is, but he is barely five years old! 



Personal space is a struggle for 2 of my kiddos this year. I decided it was time for cart squares! I had a giant rug at my old school with a square for every student. My cottage doesn't have the space for such a thing, so I decided individual carpet squares would be a great idea to space my kids out and rearrange them based on which activity I'm doing and how many of my kids are participating. I tell this great idea to my friend the speech teacher who shares my cottage (she's upstairs). Turns out her husband found a bunch downstairs at his building this week and was complaining he had no idea what to do with them! She called him right away so he could bring them home from work and she brought them to school. I'll add the pics of them to this post when I get to school :)



Last but far from least... my newest edition to the social skills reading curriculum! The book for this one is Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns to Listen by Howard Binkow. This is about a very wiggly bunny who gets in trouble every time he doesn't listen. Great illustrations and a great lesson to learn! I have a few wigglebottoms in my class who will benefit from this! I developed this for kids who can read the book independently, but there are also 2 pages for a drawing responses. These meet common core standards for literacy.




 Activities:

• Sequencing story events
• Identify cause and effect relationships using a matching activity
• Draw what it looks likes to listen/not listen, then draw what happens based on your choice