Kathy+Auter

Lesson 1 For my first lesson, I wanted to become more familiar with the various tools in the notebook software. I designed a lesson that young prewriting/early childhood students could do on the interactive white board. Many young children have difficulty with crossing midline. This is a necessary prerequisite for writing. The developmental sequence is horizontal line, vertical line and then circles and diagonals. The lesson has these activities in sequence so that the young learner can match items and make horizontal lines, vertical lines and circles. With some practice, I was able to search the gallery, line items up and develop several different pages. This allowed my students to work on an activity which encourages crossing midline, visual tracking, and identification of objects and was very engaging and fun. Lesson 2 My second lesson is for my 3rd & 4th grade students who have been working on bilateral coordination activities (cheerleading). They have learned three cheers and will be cheering at the staff /student volleyball game at Blakewood on March 4th. Originally I developed a PowerPoint presentation and printed out the handouts for them so that they could practice their three cheers at home. I will be having some regular education peers join them so inserting my PowerPoint into Notebook so that we can use the smart board is a great way to provide the visual cues for all the cheerleaders and will allow other Blakewood students to join in. This is a great way to build my two students confidence, integrate them with peers, and increase the participation of the audience as well. I’m really excited about this and so are my two students. Will have to report to you on how it all works and whether I would flip the pictures or change the orientation. Lesson 3 For my third lesson, I decided to capture items on the internet to display warm up stretches. I used the camera tool to capture the pictures, highlight the web site and description of the stretch. I also added a shade screen so the older students could identify the name of the stretch diplayed. This could be expanded to identify what muscles are being stretched. The stretches I choose are ones which the students learn and utilize before gym class or exercising in the therapy room. This lesson is for older elementary students. It could tie into the curriculum in learning about human body by identifying stretches or specific muscles of the body. It can be used by the physical education teachers to demonstrate the stretches so that they can work with individual students and assist them in completing the stretch with proper body mechanics and alignment. I can continue to add to this lesson additional stretches as deemed necessary by the stuidents ability and limitations. This lesson allowed me to try different tools within the notebook program. I'm getting more comfortable with Notebook!

Lesson 4 My fourth lesson is to use the whiteboard for learning to write capital letters. Using the "Handwriting Without Tears" curriculum developed by Jan Z. Olsen, OTR for letter formation, I will eventually have 26 pages with one page dedicated for each capital letter. I hope to expand on this and have both upper and lower case letters. Studies show that students working on a vertical surface may be easier for new writers. Handwriting requires power or stabiilty. Children with processing issues or children who did not crawl and develope their hand strength may not have the power to write on a horizontal surface. They will fatigue more readily than those that have the stability to write. The vertical surface allows them to work for longers period of times, engage them longer and provide better visual input into the writing they are doing.