We have a daily art project in our classroom. I use art as a way to practice fine motor and speech goals throughout our day. I have a collaborative relationship with my SLP and OT where we discuss student progress on a regular basis and determine what we need to do next to push students a little further. You can check out how we do this with an activity matrix in this post. And make sure you grab the free activity matrix for use in your classroom!
I love to use art time in the classroom to target language goals. I have students using a wide range of communication strategies and the matrix helps staff know exactly what we are targeting. In order to provide meaningful communication during art time, I always provide a set of visuals that are strictly related to the project at hand. This is a quick way for any student to have access to visuals as needed.
Having visuals for art lessons prepared helps our students communicate what they need in order to complete their art projects. In order for this to be successful, my team needs to make sure we are focusing on appropriate language skills with students. In this above project, my students were clearly working on requesting by attributes and I always make sure to include this in projects. We could have easily had the hearts all the same color and size if we were working on requesting single items, but as we are expanding language, if my student’s request “I want heart”, I respond by saying “Which one?” and gesturing to the many kinds of hearts that are available. If my students continue to struggle to choose a heart I will usually hold up 2 choices (i.e.: pink heart or purple heart; big heart or little heart) and prompt as needed.
Check out what we will be up to this April! Click the link to download the PDF version of these art plans for use in your classroom! All the projects come from my letter project and April Pinterest boards, follow me over there for so many more awesome ideas!
What are you up to for April?
