Spring and Mother’s Day crafts for low incidence populations

I’ve been slacking on my usual posts about activities with low incidence populations, so now I’m playing catchup.  Here’s what I’ve done with my intellectually disabled group for the past three weeks.

I live in a suburb of Washington, DC, so the Cherry Blossoms are a big thing.  When I saw this on Pinterest, I knew I had to make it!

Instead of each student doing their own, we put 2-3 students to a poster and made a collaborative piece of art.  It’s now hanging in the hallway 🙂

First, they drew the trunk and branches with brown paint, then we dipped the soda bottles in the pink paint and added the flowers, and last we put the grass at the bottom.  We worked on colors and nouns (grass, flowers, tree, trunk, branch, etc).

This activity did not take long at all, so we also did a comprehension/wrap up activity on the SMARTBoard using Boardmaker Studio.  Here are some screenshots of the Boardmaker question activity:

Last week we made umbrellas.  I also saw this craft on Pinterest.  I know you’re all shocked…

We used dot paints to decorate a paper plate.

We glued the handle to the half with the slit on top; the other half of the plate has the slit on the bottom.

Here it is all put together!

We also attached rain drops with white yarn and a hole punch, but I don’t have a picture of that.

This, again, was a rather quick craft.  Here are the Wh- questions that I asked at the end of the session using Boardmaker on the SMARTBoard.

Today we did a Mother’s Day craft/card.  Here is my inspiration.

To prepare, we cut pots, strips of green paper (2 different colors for some added dimension), and flowers using the Ellison press.  I also used white yarn.

The pot has a fold at the bottom, so it has 2 halves.

First, we used fun scissors (those craftng ones that cut different patterns) to just snip the grass.  Then, we glued it to the top of the open flower pots.  Here are two examples:

a different shade of green on eaach half

Next, the students chose which color flowers they wanted.  I had 5 colors to choose from.  If you’re doing this with more verbal students, this would be great for requesting and describing: “I want a blue flower.”  We also targeted first/second/third and top/middle/bottom.  The example includes a picture of the student on a fourth flower, but we did not.  As the students chose a flower, we just taped it to the yarn.

Next, we taped the end of the yarn into the bottom of the pot, then glued the sides of the pot shut.

The example has words written on each flower and the pot.  I adapted it for my non-verbal/non-writers by printing symbols beforehand. The students had to receptively identify the word/picture/symbol I asked for.  They read: “I”, “love”, “you”, & “Happy Mother’s Day”.

We glued  and/or taped each symbol to the flower and pot.  Both glue and tape worked, so we just did whatever was nearest to that student at the time or whichever worked for their OT goals.

I hope you can use these soon and it’s not too late!  Visit the pinterest link for the Mother’s Day craft – there’s a pot template!

~Denise