Science can be a tough subject for students with disabilities. We need to use highly engaging and interactive materials in order to engage and focus students. When students are engaged, learning is better. Here is an easy way to make science interactive.
To begin, I made the interactive poster I was going to use during our Thanksgiving theme unit. To make the poster, I printed out a blackline version of my turkey using the poster setting on my printer. For my printer, I clicked the poster button and then made the tile scale 300%. I clicked cut marks, but I didn’t really need them.
I cut the turkey out and mounted it on large green construction paper. You could also use bulletin board paper or poster board. We used the school laminator to laminate it for durability.
I repeated this process with the exact same turkey, but the color version. Once I had the turkey cut out and reassembled as a whole turkey, I laminated it. Next, I cut the turkey into pieces and added hook and loop Velcro to the pieces and their associated part on the blackline turkey. We also wrote out each body part label on sentence strips and laminated those.
End result…
For the science lesson, we began by reading this turkey book on the website Epic.com. It is free to elementary teachers. If you haven’t used it, sign up now!! If you prefer a hard copy, you can order the book on Amazon.
On Epic, we read the book twice. During the first reading, we read the book without questions or stopping. On the second time through, we stop and discuss important details and target WH questions. From this book, we learned about some of the turkey’s body parts, what they eat, names of babies, males and females, etc.
After reading the book, I pulled out the body part labels that were written on sentence strips. We practiced reading the words and talking about any facts about the body parts we learned in the book.
I scattered the words and turkey pieces (colored version) & had the students take turns finding a given word & poster piece. Students had to stick the label & turkey piece on the appropriate part of the poster.
Once the poster was complete, we were able to work on WH questions and make connections to self. Here are some of the questions we asked:
