Aren’t we constantly increasing the communication skills of our students? I use songs and music time in the classroom to help my students become more effective communicators! In our classroom, we have a daily music time. This time is really a structured downtime after our recess to regroup and get ready to learn.
It’s a 15 minute period of time after recess for my students to get ready for the rest of the day in our classroom. Our music time isn’t really anything fancy. I just have a bunch of songs that I have saved from YouTube. This period of the day allows us to regroup after recess, engage in a preferred activity for those who have a difficult time transitioning from recess, and make sure we’re ready to learn for the rest of the day.
Just because this is a less structured time in our classroom does not mean that my students aren’t communicating. Communication is really the key in our classroom. Increasing communication with songs is a great way to get your students practicing their communication skills at a different period of the day. That’s why I decided to put together a subject specific communication binder for my students to practice requesting the songs they’d like to sing in our classroom.
I’m sure you’re trying to increase the communication skills in your classroom. I’m sure you know the best way to do that is to provide students choice with their preferred activities and items. This song choice book has been a great aid to communication during music time in our classroom.
Why I’m Using a Song Choice Book in the Classroom
I’ve talked about creating a subject or activity specific communication book on the blog before. This is the same idea, but just customized to our music time in our classroom. If my goals for my students is to increase communication with songs in my classroom, I need to give my students the skills they need to be successful communicators. I find that giving students the vocabulary they need during a given activity helps aid their communication. They’re better able to express their wants and needs and communicate EFFECTIVELY.
How to Create a Song Choice Book
Getting stated to make a song choice book is really a breeze. My girl Melissa over at Autism Adventures has some editable pages in her communication book that make putting this book together easy! I opened up her file and was able to quickly add images and text to create the icons I needed for our music time in our classroom.
Creating Tabbed Pages
The first thing I did was create tabbed pages. I love the tabs because they transition so well for students who will later be using a communication device and need to use categories to find words. She makes setting these tab up super easy in her communication book! We love the Storybots songs in our classroom, so I made a page just for the alphabet songs. Then I decided to add some classic songs (Twinkle Twinkle, Row Your Boat, etc.). I made a tab for “School Song”. These are the songs we often sing during our morning meeting and calendar time. You can check those out in this post if you want to know more. Then I added a tab for each season. There are some great seasonal songs on YouTube that my students LOVE! I also added a tab for silly songs because we love a silly song in our classroom!
Creating the Icons
After I set up my tabs it was time to start creating icons. Melissa’s communication book gives you the option to have matching pieces or to leave the boards blank. I decided to put matching pieces on our alphabet pages so things didn’t end up an unorganized mess. On the other pages, I left the squares blank because I didn’t really think further organization was necessary in helping my students communicate.
You can use any image to represent your songs on your icons if you’d like. I decided my students needed pictures of the actual videos we watch. To do this I headed over to YouTube and pulled up our favorite songs. I took a screenshot of the thumbnail image on the website and then I was able to insert it into the communication book pages.
Need to know how to take a screenshot? Check out these quick videos!
Mac: watch here
PC: watch here
Now that I have everything set up, laminated, and velcroed, I just need to add a communication strip for our music time in the classroom and we’ll be ready to communicate!
