Five for Friday on 4/19

I hope everyone had a good week. I look forward to hearing what everyone was up to. This is what was up with me (in no particular order):

1. I'm ready to upload my National Board portfolio! For those of you who've done it in the past, they changed it all around this year and we have to digitally upload it. Anyway, everything is written and edited so now I just have some hours of uploading left!

2. This week I mourned the loss of a dear friend who was killed at Virginia Tech 6 years ago. I always spend a day remembering him peacefully by hiking or cooking or something else he loved to do. This year felt so different because I was also worrying for my many friends in the Boston area. Although I'm a California girl now, I spent 4 years as a kid living inside Boston and 9 years as a teenager/college student living less than an hour away from Boston. I have so many friends still out there and they were in my thoughts too. It was an emotional week for sure.

3. State testing!! Boo!  I understand and appreciate the idea of accountability for teaching all students - I'm all behind that part of No Child Left Behind (which is actually a very strong piece of special education legislation for that reason).  I am glad to see that someone thought about the kids who usually get left out of standards based programming.  BUT...this is a big but...the tests we have available to offer our students with disabilities miss the mark in allowing them to show their knowledge.  I couldn't be prouder of the kids for their hard work this week.  They are all rockstars!

4. Laughter!  I know I described some pretty tough stuff this week, it's been a very trying week, but......if you cannot learn to have a good laugh, you cannot survive the bad days.  Some of my favorites this week: Little Miss J was sharing her experiences with police officers during our community unit when she announced to the class that when the officer pulled her dad over, he told her and her siblings to quick buckle up before the officer saw they were unbuckled - I doubt Dad wanted that shared!! Little Miss S raised her hand and when she got called on, she looked at her hand with confusion wondering how in the world it ended up in the air to begin with.  It seems like we were laughing through the tough moments and then laughing some more.  I wonder what my little ones will say next week!

5. I met with my executive director this week and he told me that I'll be in the same position next year! Yay! Again, I will have two first grade rooms and two kindergarten rooms to coteach. My coteachers were so happy to find out the news and that made me feel even more excited to spend another year together.

P.S. Do you like my use of Symbolstix in this post?  They are such great pictures!  Read all about my love of Symbolstix here.

Adie

Symbol stix

Have you ever heard of Symbolstix?  It is one of my favorite tools and I use it compulsively!  Here is a sampling of icons from Symbolstix:

 

I know, they are so cute, right? Well, it gets better than that!  Symbolstix are a symbol set that are used in some communication devices (most notably Proloquo2Go on Apple devices).  I use these icons on almost every activity that I make for my students because it is a universal language that benefits my students who use AAC (alternative and augmentative communication) devices, it benefits my English Language Learners, and they are just so adorable!  I put these images next to new vocabulary words, I embed them in phonics activities, and I use them to build students' individual schedules and resources.  These images are all over my classroom!  Here are a couple of examples:

Here the Symbolstix icons are used to help a student with limited language visualize his expectations throughout the day and see what his end-of-the-day reward will be if he follows his schedule.

Here the icons are used to help a student describe their emotions during a particularly challenging emotional time in their life.  This helped my little one tell me how she was feeling more easily.

This is an accommodation to a phonics assignment (the WR Robot available at my TpT store) where the visual is there to help students identify the words more easily.

I am a little bit obsessed with Symbolstix but I think you now know why!  I even have a Symbolstix lanyard for my keys!!

Just a note: the items in my TpT and Teachers Notebook stores do not have any Symbolstix images because of their usage policy.  Just envision all of the fun items in my store full of these cute little images.  If you want to use Symbolstix with your students (which I HIGHLY encourage), you can purchase a membership for just $50 for the year.

(from),




Adie