Websites of the Day - Primary Resources and Teaching Ideas

Today I have for you two U.K. sites for primary level teachers, however much of the material is applicable or adaptable for use in the intensive special needs classroom.

The first site Primary Resources and the second is Teaching Ideas.

Websites of the Day - Winter Holiday Ideas

It's tough to be any kind of teacher the week before December break. In special needs rooms chances are your attendance will spotty, no one will be able to focus (staff or kids) and some kind of party is in order (unless your school forbids it). Here are some websites with crafts, activities or other ideas for this week.

Class-Parties.Com lists party decorations, craft, activities and recipes.

DLTK has crafts, activity ideas and printables.

Enchanted Learning has more of the same as does Easy Child Crafts.

If you are looking for some free music for your parties or activities try I Love Wavs, for Christmas, Hanukkah and New Years music, not to mention a nice selection of pre-school/elementary music.

Finally there is Childfun.com and their subsidiary ColoringBookFun.com which have coloring sheets, crafts, activities, poems and songs. Although this is a much more ad heavy site than I normally would post, I am pointing it out because of a favor they are asking of their visitors. They are asking visitors to vote for Jenny W in the Worst Holiday Gift Contest, with the prize money to be split between two of the Childfun.com board member who have been diagnosed with cancer (breast and ovarian).

Website of the Day - CBeebies Switch Games

The Inclusive Technology Company and the Children's BBC in the UK have teamed up to create online switch games for the pre-school set. Although the PBS in the USA have not caught up with this advance they do have a great resource page for parents of special needs children which focuses on technology and inclusion called Inclusive Communities.

Symbol Based Websites

So many of our students use picture symbols for communication that I thought I would highlight some of the websites that provide us with free or low cost ready made picture symbol activities.

Symbol World is a British site that contains four site areas ELive, Learning, Stories and My World. The Elive section is avaliable as PDFs or online and contains news, community, films, features, games, recipes and fun areas. The Learning section contains online symbol stories in eight curriculum areas. The stories section has stories for pre-school primary and young adult students that are picture or symbol based. Finally the My World section has stories about children and adults with low incidence disabilities. The site uses Widget symbols and is run by the Widgit Company.

Also run by the Widgit Company is the Rainforest Symbol Site. I am linking to the ASE Center site that links to this resource because when I link directly it does not work. You have to scroll down to "Lauch Rainforest Pages" and once you be sure to chose "Click for Symbols". This site is well designed for use in a Rainforest Thematic Unit.

Askability is another Bristish site which has symbol based news, events and fun sections. The fun section may be of particular interest, it contains jokes, riddles, brain teasers and stories. This site also uses Widget symbols.

New-2-You is an American company that publishes weekly newsletter for printing to use in your classroom. At a cost of $82.00 for one user for a year you get the symbol based newsletters that are on three ability levels, related communication boards and access to Joey's Locker. The Joey's Locker section contains stories, cartoons and games. Teachers also get information correlating News-2-You to curriculum guidelines and data collection sheets to download to assist in alternative assessment. Additionally for a small extra expense you can get Spanish editions of the materials.