Sue Watson is a developmental support counselor who has worked in public education since 1991, specializing in developmental services, behavioral work, and special education.
Updated on July 03, 2019This simple writing format with Santa at the top can be used for any number of writing activities:
Provide your students with both models and prompts.
Models: Students with disabilities may have both weak handwriting skills and weak fine motor skills. Providing them with models will help them get started. Perhaps these sentence starters will get your emerging writers going. Put them on the board or on chart paper and create a "Word Bank" at the bottom. It might include: reindeer, presents, packages, bag, magic, flying, sick.
Prompts: Give your students some exciting ideas for a story.
Use this format to teach your students letter writing conventions. Have them use the paper to write their annual Christmas letter to Santa. When I taught second grade, I had students write letters to Santa that were not only printed in the little local paper, some were reproduced because of the quality of the product. You can bet those kids and their parents (and grandparents, and distant relatives) were proud of those letters!
Of course Christmas means presents from Santa. For your emerging writers, how about just helping them make a list? It will encourage them to copy words carefully, recognize initial and final letters, as well as develop some familiarity with print in a way that is highly motivating.
This snowman template will provide some automatic cache for those students who have seen the animated "Frosty the Snowman." You might also pair it with reading one of the Snowmen at Night books by Caralyn Buehner to your class to spark your students' imaginations.
Here is the first of several Acrostics using Christmas themes. An acrostic is a "poem" (though rhyme has nothing to do with it,) which uses the letters of words to begin a list of appropriate words. For candy, you might suggest:
You get the idea. It serves to enrich vocabulary. You might build a word bank as a group of all the words with c, etc., that the students may use.
This one uses Gingerbread Man for your acrostic: how about using things that the Gingerman could have run away from, like
Once again, build a Word Bank with your students using the initial letters. It will encourage collaboration and build vocabulary.
After your students' stories are written, how about an acrostic? Perhaps you want to focus on character traits. What can we say about Santa?
Character traits are important for describing characters, so building familiarity will help your students when they are asked to describe characters as part of meeting the Common Core State Standards. Is the hero loyal? How do you know?
The appropriate standard:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.3
Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions).
This Acrostic would also be appropriate for your Muslim or Jewish students: For snowflakes, how about adjectives? All students have difficulty with adjectives, but students with disabilities may really struggle with the concept. Have students brainstorm all the adjectives you think of: softy, fluffy, floating, other, etc. Once your word wall is created, let students go to work.
How about whimsy for our Snowman Acrostic? Expose your students to Where the Sidewalk Ends (Shel Silverstein) an think of silly things that you can list in your acrostic about your snowman. How about making a snowman to go with your acrostic?
Some silliness to consider: