What motivates your students? I am always trying to think about this as I am preparing lessons for my self-contained preschool class. We are working on basic skills and most of my goals for my student’s are functional goals such as attending to complete a task, transitioning to an activity, participating in group activities and so on. This month we are focusing on transportation. My students LOVE wheels and anything that has wheels! I am still teaching remotely, so I am trying to get creative on how I bring in this love of wheels for them. What better way than a train theme. I started by creating boom cards with trains in them. One of my students favorite books has always been Freight Train by Donald Crews. There are lots of fun youtube videos of this story that are animated which they love. The craft we have sent home to our families is a shape train and I have made a “Let’s Make A Shape Train” boom card story to go with the shape train activity. The story focuses on shapes and making a train.
We have a show and share each week, where the students bring something to our zoom groups that they can show the class. I have their parents help them tell us about their item or they can show us what their item can do. This week we will be sharing something that has wheels. We will then end group time with virtual play time. We all play toys together on zoom and talk about what we are doing. I have really enjoyed using boom cards to reinforce basic skills. I go over the skills during group with real objects and then assign the boom cards for the parents to help their children at home during independent learning time.
