Want to hear something crazy? I am pretty sure my students might think Martin Luther King Jr. had a pet penguin. Sigh. In the midst of all the craziness of the past two weeks, we were knee deep in a penguin unit that was supposed to be finished last week. Well if you read my post from earlier this week (which – by the by – THANK YOU all for your comments – you made me feel way less alone in my journey of frustration) you know why 😉 So we are midway through penguins and then we threw a little MLK work in there and before I knew it I was writing agenda’s for my morning group that had Martin Luther King and Penguin in the same sentence. Ugh. Hope I didn’t do too much damage.
We do thematic units at Morning Group. With my students who are higher functioning we did a variety of penguin themed read alouds, a penguin poem, facts/research, and more. And don’t worry – I have tons of great ways to include your students who are lower functioning too!
So what fun things did we do in our penguin unit you ask?! With my higher group we started off researching (Ahhhh… I still love saying that!) penguins online with this research worksheet. We threw in a few penguin books and a penguin poem. I found two awesome freebie penguin games on TpT.
I found this Penguin Fact or Opinion freebie by Mrs. Lindsey. Love this. We really need to work on fact or opinion more. Plus – fact was one of our words on our research worksheet! Then I snagged this Penguin Quiz Card Set. This was exactly what I was looking for. The joys of TpT – no need to reinvent the wheel, right?! We used these to review facts and then we used these questions for the quiz at the end of the unit!
This freebie was a great into and I love using graphic organizers with my kids. Students with autism benefit from structure and visual cues so graphic organizers are a must! Thanks Alice Little for this free worksheet! I used this after we did our researching!
I took advantage of the penguin theme to squeeze in some imaginative writing from our Write About Winter Packet. Imaginative writing I find to be especially tricky for children with autism. Any opportunity we have to practice this skill – I grab on to. They did great with some of these worksheets.
We did the unit for about 2 weeks (-ish) during morning group. We ended with a quiz reviewing all of our penguin facts. This is a great way to assess comprehension, memory skills, and receptive/expressive language. I made two versions of the quiz. We did a simple 10 question quiz where I read the question aloud and students answered on their paper (using the quiz cards) and then I wrote out a quiz for my kiddo with lower receptive language. Having the questions written out helps him TONS!
All of my students did a SUPER cute craft using the visual directions from my favorite art resource – Art for Children with Autism. On of my students who has a lot of significant behavior problems and is lower functioning completed this on his own! I was floored!
I love who this book breaks each step of the craft down. It’s accessible for all of my students!
Adorable, right?
Now onto my other students. I found so many (easy!) ways to include them in this penguin theme! They loved it too! I made a bunch of penguin flashcards:
… and we used these as our stimuli for counting!
We used penguins for identifying color, practicing expressive/receptive vocabulary, and the best one – we used penguins to identify body parts on the penguin and features. We worked on identifying the head of the penguin, the foot, the wing etc. This is a benchmark on the ABLLS that I often have a hard time hitting! Perfect! Thanks penguins 🙂
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3 Responses
That book looks awesome! Thanks for sharing that – I’ll have to look into that because it looks like I’ll be teaching fine arts next year! (fingers crossed!!)
Brie @ Breezy Special Ed
This is great! This randomly reminds me (since I just looked up penguins)- are you familiar with the website tarheelreader.org? It has free books for beginning readers on just about any subject. I pull it up on our ipad all the time- might come in handy for you too!
When you do units like this at morning group, you also do the weather and the other stuff too, or do you do this instead? I’m impressed how much stuff you manage to fit in to each of your groups.