Adaptive Class Every Day

We're a big school (over 1,000 students) and have a rather large life skills group (19-20ish) and we have them for 30 minutes of adaptive art, music or PE every single day.  That's a lot of lesson planning for that group.  I've had adaptive class my entire career, but I usually had them by themselves once a week, so all my ideas/old plans were used up by October.  This is where some serious googling and pinterest stalking comes in:



Thank you Pinterest!




Thanks again, Pinterest!












I'm not a teacher who does many holiday projects (OK, so I really don't do any holiday projects, I've got too much else to cover).  But for this group, I make an exception.  With Valentines Day (today) we've been working on a few projects, the overlapping tissue hearts (seen above, and also below) and a warm/cool weaving with overlaying hearts.  I will say that the weaving was a bit of a struggle to have the paras understand that the STUDENTS needing to be placing the weft, with para support (ie, holding up the warp). I was gone (to a meeting, I think) one day and came back to Obvious Para Work, or OPW, as I like to call it.

Students drew hearts with warm or cool colored crayons,
then painted over ( two different papers).
I cut the warp, students cut the weft and wove them.

Hearts were pre-cut and students colored with
oil pastel.

These hearts were also pre-cut.  My goal was to see how they overlapped,
 making sure they were gluing correctly, etc.
 A few groups added printing on top with the toilet-paper-roll
turned-into-a-heart trick, but not this group.

We've also done some non-holiday things, like our names (I drew their names, students cut them out and taped them to 12 x 18 paper) and collage faces.  (again, I drew the face, students used stickers, markers and ribbon to add details).  Here are some examples:

Name still on, AFTER student had fingerprint painted all around.

Name half off, just to see how it looks--we just used circles of masking tape for the taping.

Ryan really likes blue a LOT.

And Kyra always chooses pink if given the choice. 
The black is either earrings or hearing aides :-)

Love the nose on hers!

I'm sure there will be future posts on Adaptive ideas (mostly stolen off the internet) because there are never enough good ideas to go around.  I try to have cutting often, along with other fine-motor activities like gluing and painting, because it's something they all need to work on.
Oh! And ours are divided into three groups: high abilities, medium abilities and intense needs.  All of these photos are from the intense needs and medium abilities groups.