I wanted to share something we are doing in my Cobb County, Georgia special-needs preschool to support our Zoo-Phonics®. My class is very young and there are some intense behaviors and sensory needs. I have some students who know all of their letters and some who are non-verbal and not yet recognizing animals. Like most cross-categorical special-needs-preschool classes, I have a large mix of ages and abilities. I was looking for a way to keep “letter of the week” examples where they could access them without eating them, throwing them, destroying them, or biting/choking on them, and something which would work for my very lowest students while still challenging my most advances students; so I made a Zoo-Phonics table. It has been extremely popular!
I use an old (tempered glass) glass-top display-style coffee table, but it would be easy to make one. I lined the bottom of the display area with reflective mylar. Every Friday after school, I fill the top of the table with items and pictures which start with the letter of the week for the following week. We add a couple of new things each day after the children leave so they can discover them the next morning. We give the children cards with pictures of the things inside the table. They use magnifying glasses and little flashlights to find the match for the items on the cards, like eye-spy, saying the names of the items. We work on SOOOO many skills and concepts at the same time to let us differentiate for our higher and lower students.
For example, one child is finding a match for an identical photograph of a large item in the table (or even an identical object to an object the teacher hands him), while his classmate might be asked to find things by color or size or function, i.e., “What do we ride on when we go to school in the morning?” or “Who made the honey in our story this morning?” This is one of our most popular centers!
Thanks again for a great program. This is my eleventh year of teaching preschool, and my second year of teaching special-needs preschool. I have used many phonics programs and really like Zoo-Phonics®. My class is learning a lot!
