Amy’s Comments (group member since Jan 08, 2008)

Amy’s comments from the Special Educators group.

Great - hope it's helpful! Haven't read the whole think but love Rick's stuff.

Also, don't know if this ties in with your class at all, but I was just reading over some info for principles of character education. The link is http://www.character.org/nsocapplicat....

Just saw and skimmed The Blue Bottle Mystery: An Asperger's Adventur at the library. It's by Kathy Hoopmann.

We have a good ASD resource center around here and they have some solid materials regarding social skills. One is at: http://www.thegraycenter.org/store/in...

Hank Zipzer books by Henry Winkler are great.

I don't know if this will help your project or not, but MI has a doc of Character Education Quality Standards at http://www.character.org/nsoc.

Also, Rick Lavoie writes a great book, "It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend".

Hope that's some help!

Right now my backbones are:
Academic Club and Live It Learn It! both by Sally Smith

Book Club materials from Planet Book Club

VandeWalle's Math Series (teaching math developmentally, and attaching activities to standards)

Words by Marcia Henry

And some Visualizing and Verbalizing workbooks from the Linda-Mood Bell stuff.

AND definitely, How the Special Needs Brain Learns from Dr. Sousa!!!!! I've been digging into How the Brain Learns Mathematics again too......



When I'm not in paperwork - or just avoiding it - I read all kinds of things. I try to inspire my students and my own kids to read as much as possible - my students are much harder to get going than my daughters. Since I work with all ages, I tend to read a lot of everything, try to read some non-fiction, but unless they're about the world of learning i don't usually get too far.

P.S. Renee, I think this topic strand is an AWESOME one!!

I use lots! In fact, I rely on tradebooks and historical fiction for my history class. I need to cover text skills/non-fiction strategies, but we try to use as many authentic sources as possible. This seems to aid their comprehension of the subject..

Anyway, my favorite recently has been THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET - great for inference, point of view, friendship and interaction with story. I've recently gotten into podcasting as a way to work on organizing spoken language and fluency for reading using language samples.

For this novel, students were assigned a character from the book and needed to create a little 1st person intro to the character and that character's perspective of Hugo from some time in the story. We haven't posted them yet, but I'll try to remember to link it when we do. They have some other novel reactions posted right now. I used Hugo with grades 3-6 (7 students).

Our podcast site is http://lma.podomatic.com/ (I use it with my older students and core classes as well.

Hi Renee,
I just read a neat one with my kids that I took into school for our elementary class. Turns out it was based on some new characters on Disney Channel, sisters I think, but I got it for the alligator. ugh, just lost the name of it. I will look it up for you though. Something about I am An Alligator and the younger sister has an alligator costume she wears everywhere. She has to do a presentation at school about herself and her older sister is trying to get her to not wear the costume. When the little one does her presentation, she does wear it, but she explains that she loves to dress up because she can be whatever she wants to be, gives a few examples (I used to dress as...) and gives a maybe next I will be too.

I have a 3rd grader in love with reptiles so I brought it because it reminded me of him (they knew they were important enough for me to think of them outside of school and that books could be connected to him), one of the younger students could finally read it by herself and she LOVES to dress up, and she worked with first, now and next :). I will try to find the name for you now!

I work with students with learning disabilities in grades 1-12 in Michigan. I have worked with this population also for about 8 years and taught reg ed for a few years before that. I love my work now though - never a boring day!! :)

I teach history using novels and have a few language labs for reading/writing/speaking, etc.... I also have two daughters who are 4 and 6 and my 6 year old is now a super reader, but struggles with sensory integration and auditory processing. I will "quiz" them tomorrow about some of their faves and check out their shelves.