Do You Know the Biscotti Kid?

I have shared my love for Sesame Street’s social emotional videos before, especially Biscotti Karate !  They have an entire library of videos that you can use to teach SEL (social emotional learning) concepts such as waiting, sharing, emotional regulation and whole body listening!  My students LOVE the video with Cookie Monster as the Biscotti Kid, and we talk about listening with our whole body often in my autism and preschool classrooms.

There is a lot of exciting research going on in the field of autism in the Atlanta area and part of these studies and research are being implemented in my county. My school is part of a research and teaching program with The Marcus Autism Center’s Emily Rubin, and last week we were videotaped on how we are implementing the SEE-KS and  SCERTS models in our autism and preschool classrooms.  There is nothing like being recorded on a Monday morning with a wild and woolly class of eight K-2 students with autism, but my friends were super stars that day!!

We reviewed the Biscotti Kid video (they have seen it previously this year) and then their fabulous teacher created an anchor chart to help our kids sort whole body vs. not whole body listening.  I made visuals using Boardmaker for everyone to get a turn, but you can also use Smarty Symbols or Lesson Pix to create these images:

Next we made our own version of the Biscotti Kid’s cookie belt using tag board, yarn and this awesome clip art of Body Parts that I bought from Educlips TPT store.   I grabbed these tags already hole punched at Hobby Lobby for under 2 bucks this week.  Next, we  glued each piece onto a tag (eyes watching, ears listening, mouth quiet, body calm).   Add a little fine motor threading into this project and voila’, a Biscotti Kid Cookie Belt (or necklace, if you cut the yarn too short like I did)!

The last piece of this fun activity was for my students to draw themselves and identify how they use their whole body to listen.   I got these body templates at Hobby Lobby too and they have a TON of uses over the next few weeks with me!  I will be posting some ideas in the coming weeks to teach more social language concepts.  We also use the book Whole Body Listening Larry to teach these same concepts in our speech sessions, and we do this often as it’s not a once and done lesson!  This fabulous teaching story adds feelings and thoughts to our listening skills and is a great next step tool.

To encourage carryover with my friends after our lesson, I gave the teacher and parapro a bag of cookies (Oreos and their gluten free counterparts from Glutino). I showed my kids and told them that if their teachers caught them listening with their whole bodies, they would get a cookie, just like the Biscotti Kid!

Have you used this video with teaching SEL?  Share your ideas here!

I am Ready (kind of)!

This is the start of an exciting year for me.  I went back to work this week in a new county, with four other full-time SLPs at a fabulous elementary school.  We have nine self-contained classrooms!  I know the year ahead is going to be a learning curve for me, but Je Suis Prest!  For you non-Outlander fans, that means “I am ready!” and it will also be my motto for the year (** if you haven’t read the Outlander books or watched the Starz series, get thee to a library/Amazon stat!!).

I have two self-contained autism classrooms, a self-contained pre-K class, and Kindergarten grade level students that I am supporting this year and started to look at my TPT resources to prepare! Here are a few products that I am going to use, to start my year off right:

My active listening interactive book will help us all start off on the right foot, with how to listen from head to toe! This book is also part of a social language interactive book bundle. I’ll add the Biscotti Karate video from Sesame Street to reinforce this important social concept that I am certain to revisit throughout the year!

I am introducing the concepts of emotional regulation, mindfulness and self control with my friends, using this packet!  Another Sesame Street video that aligns perfectly to this concept is this one from Cookie Monster, Me Want It, But Me Wait!

Do you know any “Me Monsters“?  I do and that’s why I wrote this original social skills story and activity packet on thinking about other people.  My students will meet the Me Monsters:  Allaboutme, Gimme, Mefirst and Metoo and help the Me Monsters learn how to think about others at school.  I will add yet another awesome Cookie Monster Sesame Street video on sharing :  Share It Maybe

**I have a Pinterest social skills video board with the Sesame Street videos pinned or you can find them on my social youtube channel too.  Create your own Pinterest boards and add videos that align to the social concepts you are teaching throughout the year, and voila, you will have an easy resource at your fingertips!

Last but not least, this fun little freebie is a great way to get to know your students and for them to get to know each other the first weeks of school!

What are you doing to ready yourself for the school year?  Share any great activities or videos that work for your students here!

Mindfulness with a scoop of pink oatmeal.

I love to stumble across different social language tools to use and I found this  great blog post by Maura Fox, SLP, that outlines beautifully why mindfulness aligns so well with Social Thinking concepts.  I then happened upon the TPT store, Pink Oatmeal, last week while I was looking for preschool yoga visuals, for a presentation. Beyond my intense curiosity over the name of the store, I was impressed with the variety of thematic yoga and brain break cards for littles that this school based Physical Therapist has created. Her Halloween themed yoga product below is an example and is too cute for words!

One thing leads to another when you are researching, so down the rabbit hole I went finding even more ideas after reading these posts on Edutopia.  The concept of  teaching mindfulness and breathing aligns beautifully with the Zones of Regulation .  I know I benefit from just slowing down and taking a deep breath throughout my day.  Our kids are under a lot of stress, and anxiety has skyrocketed in the past ten years in schools. Why not look at a tool that everyone can use to help with emotional regulation throughout our day?

The school based PT behind Pink Oatmeal, Chanda, also has a Youtube Channel and fun blog that shares tons of great ideas on how to build these skills with young learners!  In my preschool professional learning day presentation, we talked a lot about teaching our students breathing techniques to help calm themselves.  I love this video from Sesame Street that teaches kids how to belly breathe through a sweet song! Feel free to look through my playlist of  sounds of nature videos  to work on calming down, breathing and even visualizing all the things we can hear. I am using these in my Sunday school special needs class, to help calm my kids as they come into the room.

School also requires our kids to sit and listen for extended lengths of time, but little bodies are wired to move!  Mindfulness and movement both have foundations in teaching the language of emotion and listening skills.  Joint attention, whole body listening and developing an internal voice versus narrating everything we are thinking about out loud, are skills embedded in these techniques. Cosmic Kids Yoga is another free Youtube channel that offers fun, thematic yoga activities for little people.  They have movie themes, animal adventures and even a video with a puppy explaining what the concept of mindfulness is all about.

I know this may feel a bit “woo-woo” to you, but just consider this a minute.  Mindfulness is easy to embed in your morning circle or starting time (or end of the day) and is a research based methodology to address attention, emotional regulation, calming and compassion.  Our schools are using PBIS to address behavioral expectations and mindfulness is a tool that address all of these skills.  Being able to learn techniques to calm our minds and bodies, focus and develop empathy towards others sounds like a win to me, so take a deep, calming breath and let’s give it a go!

Do you use mindfulness or yoga with your students?  If not, what are your concerns? Share here!