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Special Education Fall Activities You Need in Your Classroom

Special education fall activities you need in your classroom

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I love fall and all the fun things you get to do including fun fall activities.  Mostly, since I’m from Florida, I just like the cooler weather. But now that Labor Day has passed, it’s time to starting thinking about pumpkins, apples and changing leaves.

It's always so fun to pull out fall activities as the air gets cooler and the holidays get closer. These activities reflect all the fun of autumn in the special education classroom from pumpkins to changing leaves. But they also provide comprehensive instruction and tools for expanding your discrete trial training, language development, common core standard-based instruction, and literacy. Click to check out what is offered!

Now it’s time to break out the fall activities and work our way to Halloween.  I’ll address Thanksgiving activities later before I review winter.

*Oh, and there’s a freebie at the end of this post!

I love to change out materials in a classroom with themes.  For many of the students I work with, seasons work well for rotating materials / themes.  They benefit from the longer periods of repetition of materials to be able to really master a skill.  Consequently, I make resources that follow the seasons.

INTERACTIVE BOOKS

I’ll start with interactive books.  In the set there are 5 books. Four books are illustrated with clip art and 1 with photos.  As with all of my seasonal interactive books, they have the opportunity to find the word, find the picture or find both to fill in or complete a sentence.

The photo book, What Happens in Fall, focuses on what happens in fall. It focuses on fall nouns including sunflowers, coat, acorn, pumpkin, turkey, candy corn, orchard, and leaves.  It includes Halloween-candy corn and Thanksgiving-turkey.

Let’s Go Apple Picking has 2 versions of matching vocabulary—one with color cards for the apple colors and one with matching colored apples.  You can choose which makes the most sense for your learners based on whether they can match non-identical picture to picture.

Fall Interactive Books AUTISM CLASSROOM  Activities You Need in Your Classroom Blog Post 9055

Going to a Football Game includes vocabulary associated with a football game: Cheerleaders, referee, touchdown, field goal, team, coaches, field, and helmet.

It’s Time for Fall Fun focuses on common autumn activities. It includes fall vocabulary including colder, coat, hayride, pumpkin patch, orchard, pick [apple], carve [pumpkin], rake [leaves], and leaves.

From Orchard to Table has verbs for driving to the apple orchard, picking apples, peeling apples, slicing apples, baking and eating an apple pie.  At the end there is a question whether students like apple pie and cards for indicating yes or no.

FALL COLOR ACTIVITIES

Color Generalization Activities Special Education Fall Activities You Need in Your Classroom Blog Post 9055

The color activities for fall include

  • 4 Interactive Books (2 with a fall leaf / season theme and 2 with back to school materials—one each with photos and one with clip art). Each interactive book has 9 colors to match to the pictures on each page.
  • 3 Mini-Books (print and go) that students cut and paste and color the items the identified color.  There are 2 versions of each mini-book—one with picture and color cues for the directions and one without (for students who could read it or for staff to use for receptive ID of colors).  One book is Halloween themed (but does not include a witch).
  • 9 Find the Color Sheets in which students circle the items of a specific color (put in page protectors or laminate and use with dry erase to re-use).  You can see examples of these in this post.
  • Color Matching Books: 1 set of photos and 1 set of clip art to sort and match to color pages that can be made into an interactive book or a file folder
  • 5 Matching File Folders (pumpkins, leaves to trees, turkeys, football, media center).

And there is a basic photo match as well that you can see the little guy doing on the left.

These materials are great for working on generalizing color activities.

Receptive Feature, Function and Categories

Receptive Feature Function Class Fall Autism Classroom Resources

These materials are designed to help students work on generalizing the concepts of identifying items by different characteristics including their function and what group or category they sort into.  

They include sorting by category with a model and without a model (as pictured below).  Both include categories  food, transportation, toys, furniture, vehicles and animals.

There are various types of color-by and dotting activities that make for easy product data, practice, and independent work.  They are also fun ways to make discrete trials more engaging.

FREEBIE ALERT:  Download free samples of these different color-by and dotting activities in my store here!

To see more about what this set contains, check out the video below:

In addition I’ve cross-listed all of the RFFC seasonal sets with specific items from common curricula / assessments including the STAR: Strategies for Teaching Based on Autism Research; the ABLLS-R: Assessment of Basic Language and Learning-Revised; the VB-MAPP: Verbal Behavior-Milestones Assessment and Placement Planning; and the PEAK: Promoting the Emergence of Advance Knowledge.  You can check out the cross-listing in the preview in the store.

Morning Meeting Add-On Kit

Fall Circle Time Special Education Fall autism classroom Activities You Need in Your Classroom Blog Post 9055

This next set is a morning meeting add- on kit for my Preschool-Primary Morning Meeting Kit.  It includes an interactive display for chanting or singing the 5 Little Pumpkins.  Visuals are included to support the book There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed Some Leaves, as well as materials for a falling leaf game that can also be used to incorporate letters, numbers or even sight words in a fun movement game.  And there are visuals for singing The Leaves on the Trees.

Check out everything included in this preview video:

Fall Basic Skills File Folders

These  are the “oldies” but goodies, the basic skills file folders.  These focus on kindergarten common core standards of matching

  • 1 file folder matching numbers to numerals (1-12)
  • 1 file folder matching numbers to numerals (1-20)
  • 1 file folder matching numbers to sets (1-10)
  • 1 file folder matching numbers to sets (1-20)
  • 1 file folder putting numbers in sequence (1-20)
  • 1 file folder matching 12 colors
  • 1 file folder matching 6 basic shapes
  • 1 file folder matching numbers to number words (1-20) (this could be split into 2)
Special Education Fall Activities You Need in Your Classroom

There are also file activities for putting numbers and letters in order and filling in the missing letter or number in the series.

These are great for independent work and practicing skills during direct instruction.  Themes include candy corn, pumpkins, and changing leaves.

Letter Task Cards

FALL LETTER TASK CARDS. DISTANCE AND PRINT. COMMON CORE ALIGNED

Finally this set of task cards is aligned with the Common Core kindergarten standards.  They include task cards for fall vocabulary as well as general vocabulary to match to beginning letters. Plus, they are great for structured or independent work systems for students with autism and related disabilities as well.

The task cards focus on basic matching and sequencing skills for letters with capitals, lower case, and pictures of items to match to beginning sounds. The use of task cards allows you to differentiate instruction easily by selecting the set or the individual cards they need.

In addition to these, you can find Halloween interactive books in my store here and Pumpkin Patch Number Task Cards here.

And finally there is a School Tools Interactive Book FREE that you can download here for the start of the year!

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