Thursday, April 28, 2011

Sensory Garden

Sensory Garden is one of those great resources you can return to for many thematic lessons, with countless opportunities to model and elicit a skill.  This interactive website presents you with a garden scene that changes across all 4 seasons, with each season providing different activities.  In the "Activities," um, activity, students are tasked to find all the actions one can do in the garden.  When they do so, they are shown an animation of the action:


The garden also has My Garden and Explore modes where students can build the garden with items from different categories and view the sensory (5 senses-related) experiences in the garden, respectively. 

Language Lens:
  • The Activities mode is a great context to model verbs, temporals and causal constructions: "The lawn needs mowing BECAUSE the grass is long!"
  • By building their own garden, students will practice using categories and descriptive skills, and perhaps explaining why they made certain choices.
  • The site is an engaging way to reinforce abstract curriculum around months, seasons, and the 5 Senses.
This site IS NOT iPad-friendly as it is flash-based.

Thank you to Teaching Students with Learning Difficulties for highlighting this resource.

3 comments:

  1. I love this site! I meant to post about it, but now I don't need to post. You saved me some work again!

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  2. Thanks, Sean!! This is a wonderful post!! Just put the link on the FB page of the S-LPs that work in my province!! Thanks for continuing to share all of these wonderful resources!

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  3. Thank you for emphasizing the importance of choosing a watering can that's comfortable to use. I've made the mistake of buying a heavy watering can in the past and it was a pain to use.

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