I created two new adapted books for St. Patrick’s Day. The set includes “Leprechaun, Leprechaun What Do You See?” and “Where is the Shamrock?” I talked about how I used the Leprechaun book paired with some free follow-up counting activities last week in therapy. This week I read the book “Where is the Shamrock?” and paired it with a simple shamrock craft.
“Where is the Shamrock?” targets the prepositional concepts “above”, “under”, “next to”, and “on” throughout the book. To set up this adapted book I placed a hard piece of Velco above, under, next to, and on each St. Patrick’s Day item on every page. If there is only 1 piece of Velcro on the page then my student will just place the shamrock 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 Shamrock 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 Shamrock grid page while reading the book.
I used different Shamrocks on every page because I wanted to make it a little more challenging for my students. I wanted the students to visually discriminate between all the different Shamrock patterns and find the correct Shamrock to match in the book. You won’t have to do this if it was too difficult for your student.
I pointed to each square as I read the book. I really focused on modeling those prepositional concepts. I tried to have my verbal students provide the correct prepositional concepts to identify “where” the Shamrock is located. 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. I have 2 students right now who I am really working on finding the prepositional concepts on their voice output devices so this book was perfect for that.
I know some of these St. Patrick’s Day concepts may not be as familiar such as “horseshoes” and “treasure map” but it is always good to learn new vocabulary terms and build up our word knowledge. Each page only targets one concept and has the visual picture to support the understanding of the term. You can model the concept and have your students practice saying the word.
After we finished reading the book we made our own Shamrocks with different patterns!
This is a great craft to work on following directions, requesting, and modeling action verbs. I just cut out shamrock from white construction paper. There are lots of different free templates online. Then I had different color green tissue paper and white paper. I was trying to use up different tissue paper I had in my room so some of the shades of green were a little weird but I was trying to do mostly dark green, light green, and white.
First, I had the students request one shade of the tissue paper. For my lower students I had them just request green but then as I gave them the light green tissue paper I modeled the concept “light green”. We took the piece of tissue paper and ripped it into smaller pieces. I modeled the concept “rip” multiple times while the students were ripping the tissue paper. I had many of my students use that word “rip” as they ripped the paper.
After we finished tearing one shade, I had the students glue that color on the shamrock. If not it becomes too much ripped paper going all over the place. I had the students squeeze glue onto the shamrock. Sometimes I had my groups put a certain number of glue dots on the shamrock to control the amount of glue. For example, we put on 5 dots and then took the pieces of tissue paper and squeezed them as we glued them on the shamrock. Again, I modeled the verb “squeeze” and then “push” as the student pushed the tissue paper on the shamrock.
After the light green was glued on I had the students again request green tissue paper. This time I had them use the dark green paper. We used the same process of “ripping”, “gluing”, “squeezing”, and “pushing” the green tissue paper onto the shamrocks. You can have the students add as much or little tissue paper to the shamrock as you want. For my higher functioning students it was easier to complete the steps and for some of my lower functioning students it took longer to rip and put on only a few pieces of tissue paper but the great thing is the shamrocks all turned out really well.
Check out the St. Patrick’s Day adapted book on TPT with this link – St. Patrick’s Day Adapted Books
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