Wednesday and Thursday: Making Deductions with Clue & Spelling Words

As I continue to teach life skills in this class, I'm learning that I need to write my mom a "Thank You" card for playing those 20 million board games she played with me when I was a kid. It blows my mind to realize how many board-games out there can help to develop life skills. I've been trying to think lately about how to not only teach the habit of making deductions to find an answer, but also allow the trainees themselves to it out themselves. Then the board-game Clue came to mind. To my surprise the game had about a 75% success rate. Two people were not very interested in the game and chose to work independently on their typing skills, but the rest of the class really enjoyed the game. Near the end of the game 2 out of the 5 trainees playing understood the concept of how to choose the weapon, person, and location for their accusations based off of information they already knew. I will definitely play this game again.

A second activity which the class did on Wednesday and Thursday was that they created picture dictionaries for their chosen spelling words. Easter Seals Arc recently ordered tablets for the classes to use and I took the opportunity to test the tablets out and tie them in with a lesson. The trainees used the app. from dictionary.com to define their chosen spelling words, after defining the words the trainees were asked to draw a picture which went along with the word's definition. The activity was a huge hit because students learned the meaning behind the spelling words they chose, and the process of drawing a picture helped make the word "stick" in their minds. I'm happy to say 7/8 students in the class earned 100% on their spelling tests yesterday, and I think some of that success came from the hard work they put into their "pictionaries."

I'm very excited in the future to continue using the tablets. Most of the class was very excited to be working with tablets and appeared to understand the devices very well without much instruction. One trainee does require more help using the tablets. This particular trainee has never used a touch-screen device before and his hands shake if he consumes too much sugar, so I'm going to take some time next week to explain how to use the tablet to him and give him a stylus to make using the touch-screen easier.