The Curse of Monday....

Today was definitely a Monday for my kids. Everyone was a little bit off. I'm currently in a SPED classroom where all of the students have autism. It is a model site for the Hawaii Department of Education, and they are planning on opening up an entire for school kids with autism based on my classroom.

My student who is always on top of everything and known as the "easy" child to work with wouldn't pay attention or do any of her work. I spend most of my day working with her, so having her act out was very unusual. The other "well behaved" student in the class was absent today, so we were stuck with mostly the problem children. Our first grade student decided that his phrase for the day was "I'm going home." My mentor teacher would ignore him, hoping the behavior would stop, and at one point he took off running down the hallway to go home.

The youngest child in our SPED classroom is a kindergartener, and we discovered today how good he is at explaining autism. He will say things like, "Make my head stop," or "why is everything so loud," or "I can't stop moving!" Those are all symptoms of autism, and it absolutely breaks my heart when he asks a teacher to "make his head stop." We would if we could.

The student that I was working with today made a wreath in her general education class. It's a little early for christmas, but I thought it was adorable-and super easy for the 2nd graders to make.

In honor of Thanksgiving this Thursday, the students have been doing all sorts of adorable turkey-related assignments. I thought this one was particularly cute- they color the parts and mix all the pages up, and then have to match the words that go together! Other pages say things like pumpkin pie, roasted turkey, etc. 

I found these absolutely adorable worksheets for coloring on pinterest. My students like to work for color-by-number worksheets, and my mentor teacher was looking for something they could color to put on the bulletin boards. I thought this was perfect! Here is a close up example from the student I worked with:

And here is what the bulletin board ended up looking like:

It was a fun activity day, but it was rough day for behavior. But Monday's are always rough, so tomorrow should be better. :)