Michaela from Especially Education and I did something big, ya’ll! Having both taught in self-contained special education classrooms, we have both experienced the difficulties and frustrations of finding appropriate resources to meet the needs of their students. So, we created a literacy curriculum tailored  for our fabulous population of kiddos!

 

The mission behind Made For Me Literacy is to provide teachers with engaging, comprehensive reading units that were designed with special learners in mind. These monthly-themed units span various subject areas, including basic reading, writing, math, science, and fine motor skills.

 

Many of the activities we included in the Made For Me Literacy curriculum provide two or three levels of difficulty. Meeting the needs of all your students is easy with the differentiation already done for you.

What’s included in the All About Apples unit? Here’s a peek at some of the activities included!

Increase independence and enhance basic math and literacy skills with task boxes! Each unit contains 4 math and 4 ELA task boxes, each with two levels of difficulty. Skills covered include number sense, sorting by size and color, touchmath addition, patterns, vocabulary, beginning sounds, tracing letters, basic sentences, and yes/no questions.

Hands on fun! File folders give students even more practice with basic math and literacy skills worked on in each unit. Each unit contains 4 math and 4 ELA file folders, each with two levels of difficulty. Skills include sorting apples by size and color, number words, counting, adding dice, errorless matching, beginning sounds, and rhyming words.

 


Cut-and-paste activities are a great way to assess student knowledge, promote independence, and practice fine motor scissor skills. These reinforce skills from the task boxes and file folders. No prep!

 


The anchor chart and art activities included teach all about the life cycle and give students opportunities for writing and how to independently following step-by-step picture directions. Each activity comes with easy print pages so you can print pieces directly on construction or cardstock paper (so students can cut the shapes out), and step by step real picture directions for students to follow independently or as a whole group activity.

Read alouds for our special education kiddos?! YES, PLEASE! For apples, we chose to focus on Apple Farmer Annie by Monica Wellington as our fiction text, and An Apple’s Life as our non-fiction text. The story time piece of these units includes pictures to complete a story map with your students, visuals for the story sequences, adapted pieces to match to the book pages, interactive wh- questions, yes/no questions, and true/false questions that are perfect for comprehension activities. We also have vocabulary words for your students to learn each month!


One of my favorite parts of the Made For Me Literacy Curriculum is the cooking and sensory activities included. Cooking is a fun, hands-on way to incorporate many academic and life skills. There are visual recipes to make applesauce and apple scented play dough. Easy-to-complete student reflection sheets are also included.

There are SO many fun apple activities to incorporate with your students to go with our curriculum.

For a fun STEM activities, you can build an apple tree! All you need is a toilet paper roll, green popsicle sticks, and red pom poms. Incorporate counting by having the students count how many leaves they stack (popsicle sticks), and how many apples (pom poms) they can stack on top before the tree falls!

 

I printed off some apple baskets and taped them to solo cups for a simple apple pom pom sort. Materials used: apple baskets freebie, solo cups, and red/yellow/green pom poms.

 

Another fun activity for fine motor or handwriting practice is to grab red or green sand (I got mine for the Dollar Tree) and throw it in a container (I used an old wooden tray from a puzzle) and have your students practice making lines or if they can, forming letters.

 

Happy Apple Week!

Categories: fallseptember