Halloween Party

This year, our Halloween party was a little different because my coworker was out of town.  We started in the morning by trick-or-treating around the school.  We practiced saying "trick or treat" and my nonverbal students exchanged a picture for "trick or treat."  I think this is helpful for kids to practice at school.  That way, if their parents want to take them trick or treating at night, they will be prepped and ready to go.  Also, for those kids whose parents cannot take them trick-or-treating (do to safety of the neighborhood or behavioral issues) they still get the chance to experience this fun activity that is such a big part of the Halloween experience for kids!  

Monopoly and Math

Yesterday, I showed you an activity I was working on in math with my mid-level and low-level math groups.  Today, I am going to share our new favorite activity in my high-level math group!  One day, in the beginning of the year, we were trying to figure out what to do in math before we had our monthly plans put together.  We decided on playing a game...and since we were all so tired of Bingo, we went digging in the game closet for something different.  We came out with Monopoly.  

Halloween Themed "More and Less"

This week in my mid-level math group, we are going over the concepts of more and less.  I found this FREE activity on TPT from Andrea Wells (check it out here!)  I actually ended up using this with my low-level math group too to work on basic counting.  A lot of my kids in this group also receive occupational therapy to work on fine motor skills like cutting and writing.  So, we started this activity by having the kids cut out all the pieces.  

Halloween Party Planning

This is an old post that I did last October, but I find very fitting since we all have Halloween coming up this week!   I have updated this post and added in some new ideas that we completed last year.  This will be our first holiday party of the school year and we will be having a party pretty much every month of the year from here on out.  When approaching a classroom party in an autism classroom, it is super important to have structures in place before hand to make your party a success. 

I have tried every type of set-up for parties on my classroom (whole group, small group), and most left me leaving work frustrated and vowing I would never have another party again.  Finally, I have found a set-up that works!  It works so well, actually, that we use it for every holiday party we have.  Basically, we split up our kids into small groups and have stations set up around the classroom with different types of activities (art, cooking, games, etc.)  During parties, we combine with another autism classroom.  This allows us to have at least 6 adults running stations (usually some of our therapists help run a station as well). 

Setting Up Inclusion

My classroom is a self-contained classroom for students with autism.  My 13 students are with me for pretty much the entire day.  Even the service providers (like speech and OT) usually push-in to my classroom.  This is great for helping my students maintain their structure and routine.  However, it doesn't give them many opportunities for participating in activities with other students or experiencing "changes" inherent in real life.  In order to facilitate inclusion in a way that works for my students, they go to gym, music, and library with their gen ed peers.  Since I teach 3 grades (and I want my students included with their appropriate grade), this can be quite confusing and complicated to add to our daily schedule.  My students also need an aid to go with them, so this adds another layer of complexity to making inclusion work.

Colorama!

I have a group of students who are working on following 2-step directions and identifying multiple attributes of objects.  This game, COLORAMA, is perfect for working on these skills while addressing social skills involved with playing a game (such as turn taking, waiting, and rolling dice).  Today, I found it at Walmart (online) for $14.

Wh Questions: Who, Where, and WHAT

Well, we are continuing along our way with learning how to answer "Wh" questions.  The past couple weeks, we have been working on "What" questions.  I used a lot of the same activities as I did for Who and Where (see this post).  

 This is a really interesting concept to teach our students.  When teaching "who" and "where" it was easy to say the answer is almost always a "person" or a "place."  What is a little harder to explain.  I decided to tell me kids what is usually "actions" or "things."  (I feel like all of this is going to lead in very nicely to learning grammar concepts such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs later on this year!).  The first day, we brainstormed a list of things and a list of actions.  We also created sentences with a "who" "what" and "where" about our trip to the zoo.  I forgot to take a picture, but here is an example.