Pairing Shapes with Everyday Concepts Using the APH Carousel of Textures

 This past school year I have loved seeing all the fun ideas from one of my talented colleagues, Keri. She has done an amazing job with creativity and instruction. Her classroom are lower elementary age students that although are awesome kids, have struggles with becoming learners. She has done a terrific job of pairing all kinds of core and Expanded Core concepts to everyday routines, concepts and experiences. I want to share two of her ideas that had a lot of impact on her students.

Keri, like all of our teachers, use the TSBVI Elementary Concepts Curriculum. She selected concepts that are most familiar to her students. One concept is their home. She used their home paired with squares and rectangles. This created some meaning with learning about shapes and lines. She used the APH Carousel of Textures to accomplish this. The Carousel of Textures has several different textured papers. 

The textured papers also allowed a secondary concept, texture discrimination, to also occur naturally. Keri worked with parents to find out if they lived in small homes or large homes. They went hands on with windows, doors, walls and tied them to shapes. They discussed big and small. Then after much simple instruction--chaining together concepts, they put together their homes. 

Look at the pictures and notice the use of lines, shapes and textures. These projects were simple enough that students could work with minimal support with making them but packed a big instructional punch. 

Now check out how another similar lesson teaches about shapes. This lesson used cars. The home lesson focused on squares and rectangles. The car lesson used the same concepts but also included circles. 

Here's my famous question: can you see how many areas of the Expanded Core are covered in these lessons? All of the areas of the ECC are covered in these lessons! Yep, these lessons involve all the areas from compensatory (concept development, organization, tactual readiness) to self-determination (self-awareness, making choices, self-instruction). These are great activities for the early childhood age students. 

You can purchase the APH Carousel of Textures from APH. Most of APH products can be purchased using quota funds. You can also check out activity ideas by using the TSBVI Elementary Concepts Curriculum.