Activity Boxes & Calm Down Kit

When I found out I was going to be teaching in the redirection classroom I knew right away I needed to have simple yet educational activities on hand for my students. I want them to be able to come to my classroom to redirect themselves but to continue to learn as well. I plan to have games, file folders, writing prompts, and many other things available but I also wanted to create simple and fun activity boxes. I picked up a couple of school boxes for $0.47 to use as these boxes. I found ideas on interest to inspire my activities. One activity I found was alphabet spoons look HERE for the original post. While I made these spoons for my personal activity boxes I realized I could do the same for numbers as well so I set to work making those too! I used blue spoons with dots and then clear spoons with the numbers to match.

I also will keep some puzzles in the boxes and I have found some other ideas on Pinterest like popsicle stick shapes, Easter egg word families, Easter egg number matching, and flash card math books, just to name a few! Where would I be with out Pinterest?!

I also found a Calm Down Kit that I thought was a great idea! I made one already and I will probably keep a couple on hand. I may even leave them with the general education teacher so they can give it to the students when they can see that they are starting to get upset. That way they can avoid having to call me or removing the student from the classroom.

The start of my collection of boxes!

I am probably going to keep one of my cabinets filled with these and take a few down to student level so they can choose a box to work on when they come into my classroom. This is all just ideas and works in progress as I still have a few weeks before I even get into my class to set it up!

Welcome!

Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to join me as I embark on a new adventure as a special education teacher!

This year I was hired as an elementary school co-teacher and then was moved into a different special education position. My new position is a difficult one, and new in the world of special education. I am now a redirection connection teacher, most often referred to as "redirection" or "redirect". Without going into the confusing details of my job description, basically I am on call to help with students who are in need of specialized support and redirection. This can be due to behavior issues or struggling in their academics to the point of needing some one on one support.

I will be honest, when I got the call of my position change I was freaking out. The school I was hired at is the school in which I completed my student teaching so I saw what happens on a daily basis and I was friends with the previous redirect teacher and saw how he was all over the place. Non-stop would be a understatement of how much work goes into this position. Then I started to put more thought into it, assessed my skill set and decided that I could totally rock this job!

Now I am super excited and have tons of ideas flowing! I decided it would be fun and helpful to document some of my ideas. While I started researching other ideas from teachers I discovered that there is not a lot of help or information in this area of special education and I waned to set this blog in motion for help to others who may find themselves in the same or similar situation as I found myself.