This Spring has been a real doozy for me! I know I say this every year, but IEPs have kept me SO busy this year that I haven’t had a chance to blog about all the fun my intellectual disabilities rooms have been having!
Sorry I’m late, but I hope you’ll be able to use these ideas next year! The OT and I have been busy crafting 🙂
For St. Patrick’s Day, we used green peppers to make shamrock prints!
We prepped by getting strips of green paper and a large piece of white paper. We snipped the green strips to look like grass, but depending on the level of your students they may be able to do that step by themselves.
First we glued the “grass” to the BOTTOM of the paper. Then we used a green pepper that had been cut in half (along the width) to print two shamrocks onto the paper ABOVE the grass. The peppers are wide enough for little hands to grasp!
I used BoardMaker to print symbols for “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” and “Happy Halloween”. I asked student to choose which should go on their picture. You could increase the field of choices, if appropriate.
Last, we drew stems onto our shamrocks. It was a sea of 4 leaf clovers in all of the classrooms! You could also talk about vegetables, plants, things that grow in the ground, the difference between green, red, and yellow, peppers and more!
(The original idea for this activity was found here.)
For Easter, we decided to try this idea from SassyDealz. We pre-cut large ovals out of white construction paper. We used medium sized white potatoes and carved out patterns using an exacto-knife. I tried to be cute and do fun patterns, like polka dots and chevron stripes. That didn’t work out so well, as you will see!
We had 4 potato halves so we chose 4 paint colors. I forgot to take a picture, but we jammed adapted forks into the skin side of the potatoes and placed each on a plate full of paint. The forks helped the students hold the potato stamps better and made everything slightly less messy. (Yes, just slightly.)
Each student got to choose 2-3 colors to print with. We used various AAC devices or the adapted method using frame magnets that I’ve highlighted before to work on requesting a color to work with.
As you can see, the designs I made didn’t exactly show up. But, they still look pretty cute! I wish I had some revelation to tell you how to better carve a pattern into your potatoes but I just don’t. Sorry!
We used yet another awesome idea from SassyDealz for our Mother’s Day craft/cards. I, too, downloaded a free mason jar image from here to use with this project. I saved the image, then printed 5×7 versions of them (2 per page) onto pink and purple paper. This is so great because it only uses black in but still looks really cute!
I also made the oval with the words to put in the bottom. You can grab yourself a copy of that for FREE here! It fits perfectly at the bottom of the mason jar image if you print it as a 5×7 like I did.
We glued the words to the BOTTOM first. Then, students dipped their fingers into the yellow paint and placed them all over the jar. Some were even flying out of the jar 🙂 One student was very averse to having his finger dipped in paint so we used the eraser end of a pencil instead. If you’d like less mess, this is a good alternative, but less personal and cute for Mom.
The last step was to sprinkle some glitter over the wet paint to make it look like they’re glowing! **Here’s a little tip – shake the excess glitter right onto the plate with the yellow paint for less wasted glitter!
They came out so cute! The students loved choosing which color their mom would prefer: pink or purple!
Clearly, most prefer purple! I hope the moms enjoy this as much as we did making it!
