Ah, I honestly don’t want Valentine’s Day to ever come (except for the 50 shades of Grey movie, obvs). But in all serious ya’ll, the activities are just too.darn.cute!!
In our class, we have a structured story time where I will try very hard to keep my friends’ attention through a story. Don’t get me wrong, my kiddos enjoy group time and they do enjoy read alouds, but the books HAVE to be either…
a: interactive/adapted
b: Pete the Cat
Okay, okay… we do read books besides Pete the Cat, but my kiddos sure do love that blue cat. So really, a lot of our reading activities in this structured story time are adapted books. One of my favorite “line” of books, or as she calls them, “Interactive Vocabulary Readers,” comes from
Jenna over at
Speech Room News. I love that with her books, I can tie in some pseudo speech therapy (even though I’m obviously NOT an SLP).
This week, we’ve been focusing on “Making Cards” from her
Valentine’s Day Pack.
While reading the book, we created our own Valentine’s, following the directions in the book. This really helped break down each step to creating a card and let me sneak in direction following, making choices, AND fine motor practice, all in one group read aloud.
When it came time to add items to our cards, I used a lot of pictures/choice cards for the students to be in charge of how they wanted their Valentine to look. They would choose the color they wanted to draw with, as well as the color and amount of hearts they wanted to cut out and glue on their cards. I got the heart punch out from Michael’s a looong time ago and I loved using it for this activity! I will certainly be buying more punch outs and using them for other projects.
In my opinion, they turned out fabulous <3
We also practice a lot of core vocabulary during this week’s reading activity by practicing putting our letters in envelopes and putting the corresponding parts to an envelope on. I just used the
assembly task from our workshop area. Incase you missed my February tasks post,
click here to read all about our work tasks for the month. Here’s a little refresher on the assembly task we’ve been practicing:
Download the freebie below:
We focused on a lot of prepositions and core vocabulary words, such as: in, on, open, close, up, & down. See the below pictures for how I worked those into the activity:
OPEN the envelope and put the card IN the envelope
CLOSE the envelope
Put ON the seal sticker
Put ON the address label, return address label, and the stamp
OPEN the mailbox
Put the card IN the mailbox
CLOSE the mailbox
Place the flag UP to let the postman know you have mail you need him to deliver.
To wrap up the week’s theme of mailing a letter, on Friday the student’s chose who their Valentine’s were for and put them in envelopes. We put on our “seal stickers” and “stamps,” which we actual Valentine’s stamps (I added the real stamps later because I forgot them at home – teacher fail). One of the teachers at our school has a mailbox outside her door, and she allowed us to use it to send our Valentine’s. The student’s LOVED getting to use a real mailbox and were SO excited to send their cards out.
I love when products just flow together to make one absolutely wonderful lesson, especially one that involved such an important life skill like mail.
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