Sped Tricks & Treats {including a FREEBIE}

Are you looking for some tricks and treats this Halloween?! You're in the right place! If you're just reading my blog post to start, be sure to keep hoping along at the end of this post until you've come back to my blog. Myself and many other special education bloggers are sharing with you tricks we use in our classrooms and some freebie treats too!

I had a hard time deciding exactly what trick I was going to share with you from my classroom. I often feel like all the things I'm doing in my classroom are all things everyone else does too and therefore it's not really a "trick" if everyone knows about it already.

Hopefully I've got something you're not already doing in your classroom & something you'll be interested in trying!

To help keep myself organized with all of the visuals we use in the classroom I color code them. I like putting our visuals on construction paper before I laminate them. Then I don't have to run to the color printer to put in card stock, then back to the classroom, blah blah blah. I just put them on construction paper for added durability.

By color coding them I can quickly remember what visuals go where in the classroom and it's also helpful for my aides too. For example I snapped some photos of the visuals we use when we are sitting on the carpet. All of these visuals are on yellow construction paper.

Sand table visuals go on blue construction paper, work box visuals on black construction paper, etc. Two of these visuals are actually taped to our message board so there isn't exactly the need to remember where they are used in the classroom; but that will be nice at the end of the year when it's time to pack everything up for the summer.

Hopefully that's just a simple small trick you can take back to your classroom. It comes in handy the most with smaller visuals that can easily be placed in an apron pocket or left on a table and misplaced. And now for the even better stuff; THE TREAT!

I can only image that a few of you looked at the pictures I shared from our greeting/carpet time and thought to yourself- "Hey! I want that for my classroom!" The schedule that I use for the things we do during our greeting time would be a little more challenging to share with you seeing as that probably looks very different in a lot of classrooms. But what I can share with you is the visual board for choosing where you want to play. There is enough space for 10 different options and these options will always be changing depending on what toys/games are available that week. Students simply move the picture to the bottom to create the sentence and then point to each picture as they repeat the sentence or an adult repeats it for them.

The freebie includes some images of possible toy selections & choices you may have in your classroom, but you can obviously use pictures you have existing in your classroom already. I CANNOT share the pictures shown in the image above that are for block area, toy area, etc. because those are images from our High Scope curriculum so they will NOT be apart of the freebie.

Click the image below to download your freebie!

Don't forget to keep going! Find more great tricks and treats by clicking below and heading over to the next blog!