Let’s talk about my classroom language arts center!

My class is a TK-1st grade autism classroom.  I structure the day with centers, which makes for a nicely structured environment for my students.  My centers are all various subjects ranging from independent skills, math skills, language arts skills, and play skills.  One of my teacher-led centers focuses solely on language arts skills and their ELA IEP goals for my students. Keep reading to see what activities we do!

TAH Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks

The Autism Helper Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks are a great activity to use at my ELA center.  I have a lot of students in my classroom so I have to have groups of 1-4 students at each center.  This can be challenging when students are in primary grades like mine.  While one adult works closely with one or two students, another student or students may be working on an Easy Matching Weekly Workbook – which is quite helpful plus, my students love these!

What I love most about these:  Each workbook has different activities at the same skill level so the student or child can do one workbook a day and not get bored. The easy matching tasks are great to build independent work skills, fine motor abilities, and task initiation.

TAH Leveled Daily Curriculum

The Autism Helper Language Arts Leveled Daily Curriculum and The Autism Helper Reading Comprehension Leveled Daily Curriculum are a must in my classroom because these plan out my Language Arts instruction for the ENTIRE YEAR.  Yep.  The whole year is planned for me.  I love to pair these with supplemental activities such as alphabet books, letter manipulatives, and file folder activities.  Some of my students are not ready for Level 1 yet, so we use Level 0.5 (Language Arts only).

What I love most about these:  There are 8 Units included plus a review unit! Each unit includes:

– a pre-test and post-test (great data for IEP meetings!)

– grading rubric with data based decision making component

– 5 different versions of a vocabulary page (Language Arts)

– flashcards (Reading Comprehension)

– 20 activities

The daily curriculum provides AMAZING data and work samples for IEP meetings as well as beginning and end of the year work samples.  I also love the supplemental file folder activities that are sold separate.

To determine which level is best for my students, I use TAH Curriculum Skills Matrix.

Letter Identification

TAH Leveled Daily Curriculum is so amazing that it even comes with recommended supplemental activities for my students.  To supplement the curriculum, as well as work on fine motor skills, coloring skills, and writing skills, my students have various other workbooks.  In addition, my students practice their letter identification using manipulative objects from Lakeshore Learning such as the magnetic letters, alphabet letter tubs, and mini letter books from Oriental Trading Co with tactile letters.  

Sight Words

Many of my students are also working on sight word identification.  If we are not practicing frequency using sight words, we are doing fun activities like the ones in this bundle from Keeping My Kinders Busy.  

My classroom also has Square Panda games that work with iPads.  These help with letter/sound identification, spelling, and rhyming.  My students love their Square Panda time!

What do you use for your language arts center?  Do you have any questions about what I use? Let me know below.  Thanks for reading!