Week One: New Room, New Center, Honest Review...

Here it is! My beautiful new room. In the past week, I've been able to do music therapy sessions with all of my students, and I started to introduce the idea of doing centers with six of my eleven large groups.

It went pretty well this week. I've already made some adjustments and will be working hard to get other things put together before everything works effectively, but things went pretty well.

I have made a data sheet for my paraeducators to fill out when they are with their students in the centers. They will keep track of our behavior management system, the amount of time kids engage in the center itself, and how much assistance the kids needed to complete the station. I changed from a paper-based format to a laminated sheet and have figured out how to accommodate client changes (four of my clients left in the 30 minutes after I laminated things - no prior notification!) without having to laminate things over and over again.

I still have some things to work out.

I need a way to help kids be more independent in finding their own center at the right time. I also need a bigger variety of sensory centers. Looks like I'll be taking some of my recent paycheck to shop on Amazon for pom-poms, cotton balls, and other manipulatives that I can use.

I am also working on developing center ideas. I downloaded a bunch of song-based file folder and instrument activities from Teachers Pay Teachers (by the way, I do NOT get any money or benefit from mentioning any site on this blog - my ideas and opinions are completely my own) and will be making those into folders for the Learn center. Some of them are theme related. Others are just time fillers. I will laminate them all into purple file folders (purple is the color I chose for music TMEs) with yellow stickers (yellow is for academic/cognitive TMEs). I am also going to buy specific songs for the listening center. I also want a headphone listening center - there's one at Lakeshore that I can get for $25.00.

Gotta - stopped there because I had to get ready to completely screw up a training for the Online Conference for Music Therapy - did it! COMPLETELY SCREWED IT UP! (I started today with a rant about technology, and technology rose to the occasion and got me where it hurts!) Back to bed during the current ice storm.

My room is starting to feel like home. That's what I want it to feel like - home. 

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