Functional Calendar Routine

Calendar skills are something that are super important. Students (of all ages) need to be able to look at and understand a calendar. There are also so many skills you can tie into a daily calendar routine. In the past I always printed cute theme calendar pieces that I laminated, Velcroed and stored in a cute little container by the board. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this. However, I don't have time for that. It was so much prep work. And then.....something comes up and you don't have a piece you need AHHHH!!!! My friends, no worries. I have the answer, introduce this Functional Calendar Routine into your day.

This idea was one that came to me at 3:00 in the morning and I had to roll over and add it into my Amazon account before falling back asleep. In most of our special education classes we are teaching functional/life skills. So....why not get the kids using a REAL calendar? Since this idea just came to me and I haven't started school (heck I haven't even been allowed in my classroom) I don't have it set up and these pictures have totally made up activities on them but I wanted you to be able to see what the heck I am talking about.

Here it is......a standard (well school year) desk calendar. You can purchase any calendar but I liked this one because it has holes in the binding. That way I can hang it on Command hooks. I also liked that it has large day boxes and a section for notes.

Using this desk calendar allows me to do WHATEVER I want. If I want to work on patterns I can, if I want to add special days I can, if I want to show my students when school and non-school days are I can. Best of all, after I think I have the month complete and I get the news that "Mrs. Smith's" class is going on a field trip to the Dairy Queen I don't have to run to the computer, print off a picture, laminate it, velcro it and get it on the calendar. All I have to do is WRITE IT!!!! Actually I am going to have my kids write it. I am going to get them used to handling a real calendar just like I do everyday.

Here are a few things you could do:

Patterns- Since you are able to do whatever you want and you don't have to worry about prep work do whatever your kids need. Make the patterns easy or complicated. You could have monthly theme patterns like I have shown. You could do a color pattern (just draw colored dots), community signs, school supplies, core words, spelling words....honestly it's endless!!

Special Days- color in the box, outline the box, write inside the box, use the notes section and color code it. I am really excited about this because my students are assigned to a general education class as well as my class. There are so many different activities going on, it gets overwhelming having to make cute pieces to go along with everything. I know, I know I could just throw something up on my cute calendar but....my students I won't have it. I can't deal with things not all matching. I think I am going to utilize the system I have below. I will write in the box when it has something to do with my class and then color code the boxes when it has to do with a gen. ed class. For example...students in "Mrs. Smith's" class will know their color is blue. So when something is outlined in blue they will know it is their day. Then I will write what the activity is in the notes section.

Weekends- Color weekends/no school days red. This was students can visually see when they don't have school. My students really struggle with the concept of school/no school days. This will be an added visual support for them.

Review Months- since the month before and after are listed on the calendar its a good way to practice/review.

Something else that is cool is when the month is over you can rip it off and hang it up like an anchor chart or take a picture, print it and store in a binder or have for student scrapbooks. That way you and your students can look back and see all of the things they did throughout the year.

Is this something you will be adding to your classroom? Do you have another use for this functional calendar routine?

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Morning Meeting Activities (functional skills)

I love morning meeting because it gives me the chance to work with all of my students in a whole group. Since most of our day is filled with rigorous interventions, fluency timings, discrete trials and countless hours of data tracking I like to make our morning group a fun and predictable time! Even though I like to make it fun, morning meeting/group is a GREAT time to throw in some functional academics.

Here is a picture of our schedule. I color coordinate everything in my classroom. Everything to do with morning group is purple!

After the kids have gone to their lockers and turned in homework they start their personal information binders (you can read more about them here).  The kids are allowed into the building 15 minutes before our bell rings so I use the binders as our "morning work".

As soon as the bell rings we start our morning group. This year I am super excited to announce that I have a SMARTboard in my classroom. If you don't have a SMARTboard no worries. You can easily do the activities using our favorite tools (laminate and velcro!!).

We start off  by checking in.

I have all of my students pictures in the red and one by one I will have them come up and move their picture from red to green. Once everyone is finished we tally up how many students are in each column. Once we are able to master this, I will start to have the kids add the numbers together. And just like that we have already done a picture identification and counting activity. 

After check in we work on one of my favorite things, greetings.

Communication is a HUGE part of my classroom so it is so important to incorporate as many opportunities to socialize as possible. At the beginning of the year I greet every student using the same phrasing "Good Morning Name", I then ask them to say good morning or hello Mrs. Boysal to me. Then I ask "how are you?" and make sure they respond appropriately and then ask me how I am doing. As the year progresses I will add more phrases to the board and have students start to greet each other. I did this last year and it was so much fun to see how much growth my kiddos had with communication and interactions with each other. 

After greetings comes everyone's go to morning activity, calendar!

Calendar is a functional skill that must be done everyday. We don't do anything fancy for calendar but I do have a fun way of picking kids to put up the new date. Everyday I select an apple and a students picture will appear. That student gets to come up and add the date. To make this fun and suspenseful for the students I am going to recover the picture and rotate them every day. This is a great way for kids to practice turn taking. Sometimes kids have to wait more than a week to come up and participate.

Another portion of our calendar routine is learning about the weather. 

I am going to have the students look up the temperature ever day. I made the little thermometer a link right to weather.com (I was feeling so tech savvy when making this :)). We will also work on number writing by filing in the temperature and identifying and understanding seasons.

Our next part of morning group is practice.

I am fortunate to have ULS and love the spelling that they provide. We work on reading our words, using them in sentences, spelling them in funny voices and writing them. 

So as I said before communication is so very important. I close out our session almost the same way I start. I get the kids talking!!! During our Let's Chat session I use a number of prompts and questions to get the kids thinking and talking. (Both of these are from Sasha at The Autism Helper)

In the end, it is important to remember that when planning a morning group, or any lesson for that matter, ask yourself "what's the purpose of this?" If you can't answer that, then try rethinking what your central goal is. You want everything you do to serve a purpose. 

What activities do you do during your morning group? Do you keep it fun or do you incorporate functional skills like me?

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