I’ve been on a roll making adapted books to target prepositional concepts.  My new one for this season is “Where is the Easter Egg?”  The book targets the prepositional concepts “in”, “under”, “above”, and “next to”.   I paired the book with an Easter egg craft and that is what I’m doing in therapy this week for many of my groups.

Just a quick refresh on how to set up these books.  I placed piece of hard Velco above, under, next to, and in/on each Easter item on every page.  If there is only 1 piece of Velcro on the page then my student will just place the egg on the Velcro piece and it doesn’t identify his/her understanding of the prepositional concept.  I added soft Velcro to the back of all the different Easter egg pieces and stored them on the grid page.  As usual I attached the grid page to the right side of the last page in the book.  This way you can flip out the Easter egg grid page while reading the book.

I point to each square as I read the book.  For some of my verbal students when it is their turn, they like to read the words with me.  Sometimes we read it together or sometimes the student repeats the words after me.  I really focused on modeling those prepositional concepts.  For example, when we read “above” I have the student raise their hands up high above their heads and as we read “under” we point down under our chairs.

For my verbal students after they place the egg on the correct location, I have them tell me again “where” the egg is using that prepositional phrase.  For example, “next to the Easter bunny”.

For some of my non-verbal students I had them either touch the correct prepositional term on the core board or their voice output device.  One of my students did awesome this week using her Nova Chat while reading the story.  She found the preposition and then the item.  For example “under rainbow”

Then she did “over the umbrella” for “above the umbrella”.  It was amazing to see her navigate the device to find the location and item.

After we finished reading the book we made our own Easter eggs with lots of different colors!

This is a great craft to work on following directions, requesting, and modeling action verbs.  I just cut out large eggs from white paper.  I got lots of different color finger paints.  First the students requested a large white Easter egg.  Some of my students requested the egg with a single word utterance “want” or “egg” while other students said “I want egg” or “white egg”.

I opened one jar of paint and poured a small amount on a paper plate.  The students requested the color paint and dipped their finger into the paint.  Then they used their finger to add dots of paint on the egg.  You can have your student add a set number of dots.  They can count to 5 or 10 and then dip their finger back to get more paint.  The student can also request “more” each time they need more paint.  After the student finished with the first color I just wiped off their finger with a baby wipe (have the student use the same baby wipe until the end – they only need to wipe their finger after each color)

After we add the first color we move on to the second color.  I pour another color of paint onto the paper plate.  The students request the new color of paint and continue to finger paint the new color onto the Easter egg.

For each color we pour a little bit on the plate and I have the students request the needed color.  The student add some dots onto the egg and then wipes their finger again when he/she is finished with that color.

We used 6 different colors for our Easter eggs.  It worked out really well and wasn’t that messy which is always a plus in my book!