This week in Preschool and Intellectual Disabilities we made apple trees! The tools we used added a fun sensory aspect, too! We worked on vocabulary, sequencing, top/bottom, big/little, parts of a whole, requesting, adjective+noun phrases, and more!
Here’s what I started with:
First, we talked about the parts of a tree.
Then each child glued a pre-cut paper trunk to the bottom of their paper.
The next step was to use a bath loofah dipped in green paint to paint leaves “on top” of the trunk and grass on the “bottom” of the paper.
The next step involved a champagne cork. Champagne corks have a little bulb on top so they’re easy for little hands to grasp. So, naturally, I sacrificed for the good of my students and bought some champagne last weekend 😉 The best part of today was when I asked the group what the cork was. One little boy said, “A Cork!” I asked him where we find a cork. He said, “A bottle! A message in a bottle. Like a pirate.” Whoa, dodged a bullet there. 😉 What a sweet, innocent answer.
We added some apples on the ground and some were even falling!
Here are some examples of a finished product:
Next we did a sequencing activity. I made these visuals and we velcroed the steps onto a mat. I gave each student a choice of 2 pictures for which we did first, next, last, etc.
And the very last thing we did was work on big and little. I used both punch-outs (pictured below) and printed cards (not pictured) to target this.
The kids really loved this activity. I gave the special ed teacher some extension activities to use to target language goals for the rest of the week. Go here to download all of the visuals I used and more, including: categorizing, a communication board for non-verbal students, sequencing, parts of an apple and tree, things you can and can’t do with an apple, big/little cards, and top/bottom cards, plus a template to print your own tree trunks on brown construction paper.
