Classroom Set-Up: Visual Schedules

It's that time of year...back to school shopping, classroom set-up, and prepping for the new school year ahead.  Are you a new teacher looking for some materials to set up your brand new classroom? Or a veteran teacher looking to revamp classroom visuals or up your data game?  I want to take a chance over the next couple weeks to share some tips and ideas for setting up your classroom this coming year.

I recently put together a product based on all the resources I created and implemented in my classroom so that others can use the ideas that worked so well for me, without the work of having to create it on their own....  over 150 pages of class-room set up materials included in the Complete Autism Classroom Set-Up!  I have used this baby in my district with tons of teachers already this past year...and it has been a big hit.  Today, let's talk about one aspect of this product, Visual Schedules:

  

Creating Daily Routines to Eliminate Downtime and Increase Productivity

Imagine telling your students to sit down at the table for math. You finally get 4 students seated, but then you turn your back for two seconds to grab the materials for your lesson, and in the mean time, two kids pop up and run back to their preferred activities. Scenarios like these make me want to pull my hair out...I hate down time...my students struggle with it, which makes my life as a teacher so much harder. So one way I have found to eliminate as much downtime as possible (beside packing my day full of activities) is to create routines in every part of my day. This way, students know what is expected and can independently get going with an activity even when I have to run and grab some materials, deal with a challenging behavior, etc. It makes my students (and me) more productive! In today's post, I want to share some helpful tips and activities I have found to reduce downtime in the classroom.

Expected vs. Unexpected: Behaviors in School Adapted Book

If you are a long time follower of my blog, you probably know already that I am a huge fan of adapted books (see additional links at the bottom of the page for more blog posts on this topic).

They just seem to be one of the best ways I have found to engage students in literacy and aid in their comprehension of the text. In addition, I find them helpful for teaching social skills for those students that a typical "social story" doesn't quite work for.  I like them because they allow for additional opportunities to practice identifying a skill.

Beginning Coloring Worksheets for Kids with Autism

I remember when I first started teaching and I had a mentor tell me about setting up stations.   She said that one of the easiest stations to set up would be an art station where my students could just complete coloring pages or draw.  Um...had she met my students? When I gave them crayons, they got chewed on or tossed back in my face.  The thing was, I realized my students did love art projects, they just needed tons of structure to teach them what was expected.  One of my paraprofessionals did end up running the art station in my classroom and as long as the kids had a model of the end product and clear steps of the process, they did much better.

Does this sound familiar to you?  Are your students struggling to color or draw independently? Then this newest product...Beginning Coloring Worksheets for Kids with Autism could be great in your classroom. It provides a visual model of the finished picture, which allows your students to understand what is expected and increase their level of independence.  I also like that the model/sample of the completed picture is right on the activity itself which helps students who struggle with looking back and forth between the board and their work.  And you guys...check out how great my students did with these...I am so proud of their work!

Social Stories for Expected School Behavior

Looking for some tools to have ready in your classroom day one of the school year to help your kiddos learn expected behaviors for a variety of school environments?  I love using these stories that cover some of the most important social skills needed in school.

 

Replacement Behavior

You know all those behaviors that drive you crazy? Running away, shouting out, whining, hitting, etc.? Replacement behaviors are what we wish our students would do instead...and they should serve the same function as the original behavior.  So instead of running away to get your attention, we would want our students to ask us to play a game with them.  Or instead of whining every time they want the iPad, we may teach the replacement behavior of having a student request in a non whiny tone "Can I have the iPad please?"

The key factor with this is being able to identify the challenging behavior as well as the function it serves (attention, escape, sensory, or access tangibles) and then the appropriate replacement behavior.

The tricky part is figuring out what the function of the behavior is...so many behaviors can look the same, but serve a different function for each person doing them.  For instance, let's look at an example of a student who runs away.

How to Teach Students to Solve Conflicts with Peers

So many of our students with ASD have some sort of goal around learning social skills.  One social skill many of my students struggled to deal with was conflicts with their peers.  And trying to put on my teacher mediator hat and teach them how to deal with it in the moment wasn't enough.  They needed pre-teaching of the skills prior to being able to utilize them in real life scenarios.  Which brings me to today's post on a couple, simple teaching tools that are differentiated to individual student levels to help them learn how to identify what bothers them and how to problem solve with a peer.