From Baltimore comes this suggestion from Magi Shepley
I am a newly starting special education teacher with the Baltimore
City schools. I have almost no talent in art, but I think even I can manage
the color/number mats and the notice board borders. I love the ideas you
have posted here, and thought maybe I could share some of the ones I had(when
I was student teaching) with you.
We did a unit on Lancaster County (which is where I'm from), with my Educable
mentally retarded and trainable mentally retarded(EMR/TMR) high school students
in Long Island, NY. I went to school up there, and they thought it was really
neat that one of their teachers was not from Long Island.
Anyway... during the Unit, since Lancaster has the nickname of the 'pretzel
capital', we made our own soft pretzels. The recipe was very easy, and can
be found in just about any cookbook. Each child took turns doing something
and we passed the bowl around the table so everybody could stir. It gave
the students the opportunity to see what a raw egg looked like, and to touch/feel
the dough. We discussed why the dough was warm(yeast reaction), and why
we had to put sugar in something that wasn't sweet(to feed the yeast).
I mainly used foods that were made in Lancaster County or had a basis in
Lancaster and were then sold on Long Island. Things like locally made potato
chips were donated to us, and then we bought a national brand and compared
color, quantity, price and value. We did science experiments to see which
brand was greasier(dunked the chips in water to see if the grease would
come off, wrapped them in absorbant paper and left them for a weekend, etc).
The unit was really a success... we did maps of Pennsylvania with little
symbols that marked pretzels and such. That wasn't such a success... but
the rest of it was. :) Magi Shepley
Thanks Magi
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