I Spy with My Little Eye is a great activity to promote peer-peer interaction in self-contained, blended and
regular education classrooms. Children with special needs, however, sometimes experience
difficulty understanding the task requirements for this common interactive game. This version of the I Spy With My Little Eye activity is designed to lay the foundation for understanding the principles of the game, while simultaneously working on clothing and color concepts.
Students are provided with a color label, i.e., “I spy with my little eye something that
is …. (orange) and are invited to find the requested color from an array of
five items (e.g. the orange socks must be selected from an array that includes green,
purple, pink and red socks. When a
student successfully touches the requested item, the program speaks the correct
answer, e.g. “orange socks”. If the student selects an incorrect item, the
program provides a simple negative response “huhugh’. Across several pages the
activity addresses 10 colors and 10 clothing items.
The original downloaded version is a matching task, by design. The requested color always appears as an oval at the end of the spyglass, thus providing an additional cue. The activity can, however, be made more challenging, i.e., with no color cue provided.
You must first change the downloaded show version (.pps) into a design version (.ppt or pptx) (information is available in a previous blog post, 03-02-15 Adding PCS Symbols), then drag the color ovals ‘off page’. The ovals will still fade in, but will be fading in ‘off screen’ where they can’t be seen. Now the required task is no longer a matching task but rather a color identification task.
Both Mary Wore Her Red Dress and I Spy With My Little Eye use the same type
of clothing items. This duplicity is very much intended.
Whenever
I am using the Mary Wore Her Red Dress Animated Step-by-Step Song™ I always add
the chant, “I spy with my little eye something that is …… (program announces
the color) while the page is loading the clothing item and its color label. There
is ‘method in my madness’. I’m actually introducing
this phrase to eventually segue to the I
Spy Game in the future.
You will recall, the Mary Wore Her Red Dress Song includes
an extension activity that invites students to sing about an item they are
wearing to school today.
The I Spy with My Little Eye Game lends
itself to a similar extension activity in which the mystery items are items the
children are wearing that day, e.g., "I Spy with my little eye something that is … green."
Children are guessing the mystery item based on what their peers are
wearing. “Is it Jason’s green shoes? … Is
it Andrea’s green barrette? …. Is it the green dinosaurs on Ishma’s running
shoes? Is it Hasad’s green ring?
To help students make the transition to the way the game is
traditionally played, i.e., using all the objects in the room, the I Spy Animated Step-by-Step™ offers a
simple extension activity encouraging students to select a color which then navigates to a page that allows them to explore the labels of similarly colored objects (with a few incorrect items
thrown into the mix to provide some contrast). Whenever an item is touched,
it’s label is announced, e.g., yellow apple, yellow banana (yellow page)…. blue
plate, blue scissors (blue page).
Eventually the class can transition to a fuller array of mystery
options throughout the classroom. As children wander around the room looking
for that mystery item “… something that is … green”, additional location clues may
be provided …. “You’re getting warmer.” or “Nope, now you’re getting colder (as
they move away from the target object).
There are three versions of the I Spy with My Little Eye
Animated Step-by-Step™ Game and the Mary Wore Her Red Dress Animated Step-by-Step™ Song: Regular, SymbolStix, PCS symbols. These titles are
available for purchase on the Teachers Pay Teachers site.
…’til the next post
(new posts every Monday!)
©2015 Carol Goossens’, Ph. D.
Augmentative Communication Specialist
Speech-Language Pathologist
Special Educator
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