This lesson was designed for elementary school aged Special Needs students who often communicate using maladaptive behavior. Communicating our wants and needs can be done in a variety of ways. We can run around screaming, grabbing, or hitting people and receive a lot of negative attention, or we can choose a more effective way.  We can communicate calmly.  When we communicate calmly, we can give someone a clear message, much more quickly and using much less energy. To efficiently get our message across to someone, we need to do several things. We need to be calm, kindly get the person's attention, show the person what we want by saying the word, pointing at the object, or demonstrating the action. We will want the person to know we are giving our best, kindest effort. Therefore, we will use a gesture of kindness by saying (or signing) "please."

Students will explore five different "Discovery Buckets". These buckets will give them opportunities to practice expressing both their thoughts and feelings.

Over the course of a few days,  students will learn to identify characters from stories.  Students will identify a character from a book they have read.  They will draw their character, take a picture of their drawing, and create a post in Adobe Creative Cloud Express on their character.  They will then get to present their post in small groups.  

Over the course of a week, each student will use an iPad to express their opinion on their favorite food through drawings/photos, written and spoken words. The teacher can combine the pages and recordings to create a class book read and explained from the students.  

In this lesson, students will brainstorm and decide what their favorite birthday gift has been! Students will share with classmates the story of their favorite birthday gift and why it was their favorite.