Hola, everyone! This week our Sensory and Fine Motor Groups celebrated hispanic heritage month. Our Language Group looked at words that start with letter E.

Sensory Group—Hispanic Heritage

Cara’s book focused on many aspects of hispanic culture including famous people with hispanic heritage. Our students loved it!

Hispanic culture is so colorful and so was our

first box! We filled it with flowers and paper

streamers just like a fiesta. We also put some

plastic fruit to remind us of Cesar Chavez

who fought for farm workers rights. We

put in Dora the Explorer stickers, magnets

from places with hispanic names, a gavel for

Sonia Sotomayer a supreme court judge, and a voice output device with a snippet of one of Selena Gomez songs. So many cool things to talk about. In addition to the wonderful opportunities to increase language this box addresses the social studies access point of recognizing people from diverse backgrounds make contributions.

 

 

 

 

Severo Ochoa won the Nobel prize for synthesizing RNA (riboneucleic acid). These springs (found at the junk store) looked similar to its shape.

As these springs move around they are very eye catching and look at this smile—beautiful 🙂

This box addresses the science access point of tracking objects up and down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our next box contained cornmeal which reminded

us of yummy foods  like tacos and tortilla chips.

This stuff is so much fun to sift and run fingers

through and discover  the letter H for hispanic

heritage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another nod to hispanic cuisine with our box of dried pinto beans. This box gives our students a wonderful opportunity to practice their scooping skills…..

….and develop tactile discrimination as the

individual beans touch their fingers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oscar de la Renta uses fabric to make beautiful clothes. This box had lots of different textures to compare and contrast. Some of our students used them to make their own fashion statements 🙂

We placed pairs of fabrics in the box to address the access point of recognizing objects that are identical to each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some dried lentils in a water bottle made a wonderful

noisy maraca.

Bilateral functions are addressed as

the students move the bottle from hand to hand.

We have found that hot glueing the lid prevents

accidents 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We made some finger paint to honor painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

We used a free coloring page and let our students explore the interesting texture. So much fun to squish around! The difference between the dry paper and the wet finger paint helps our students with the access point related to distinguishing between objects that are wet and objects that are dry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we rinsed our hands in grape scented water—

remembering  Delores Huerta who co-founded

the National Farm Workers Association.  We

used some inexpensive bubble bath from the

dollar store and it had a really strong scent to

which our students really responded.

 

 

 

 

We finished with some orange scented lotion and discussed Spain where many hispanic ancestors came from. As we rubbed the lotion on their hands, our students were given the opportunity to indicate a desire for more or no more addressing math access points.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fine Motor Group—Hispanic Heritage

On Tuesday we practiced hitting the pinata (hanging bolster)  in the sensory room—what a great activity for bilateral coordination and crossing midline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had  so much fun with the maraca in our

sensory group and we had to make more!

We started by picking out ONE egg—

addressing one to one correspondence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we scooped ONE scoop of dried beans into our egg. Holding the egg with one hand and scooping with the other addresses bilateral functions.

What a nice job shown in this picture, although most of our students needed some help….. And in case you are wondering, not all our students stopped at one—a couple dove in with both hands and beans went flying everywhere 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The adults placed masking tape around the egg then

taped on two plastic spoons—which we counted

out, of course!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next we colored the eggs with markers to make them bright and colorful.

TaDa—these were a HUGE hit. The students loved

shaking them and laughing as we tried singing

La Cucaracha.

We had the best time 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

On Thursday we made some ponchos out of grocery bags (we saw this on the Family Fun website). We precut the opening for the head and the slits up the sides and then had our students practice writing their names on the back.

Then we flipped them over and began decorating the ponchos. We used Crayola’s pipsqueak markers which are easy for our little hands to hold.

We used our adaptive scissors to make fringe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making multiple cuts addresses the math access

point of recognizing the next step in a sequence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Completely awesome poncho,

don’t you think!

Can our students possibly get any cuter 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Language Group—letter E

We brought back our Edible cornmeal and had fun tracing the letter E.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we strung some Enormous beads—-two beads

for Each student!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next we Explored the contents of this bag…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…..and Extracted an

Elephant!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time to decorate an Egg. We used Eggplant colored Elbow macaroni—giving us an Excellent opportunity to work on our pincer grasp.

And here it is …….

an Elegant Egg!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everybody got an opportunity to play Cara’s sound game….so Exciting!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We finished as usual by looking at some of the wonderful

E words we found today.

Adios for now, join us next week Group by Group!