There are so many learning opportunities for incidental teaching in art in the classroom. I've highlighted 5 in this post.
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Let me come clean at the start of this post....I promised a freebie related to discrete trials in my last post and I'm just not quite done with it yet. I do promise that it will be worth the wait but I need to make sure I have all the ducks in a row before I can release it. So please hang with me if you can for another post or two before I'm ready to share. I actually found I was delaying this post in order to be able to post it, but it's just going to take more time than I expected (and when have I NOT said that about any type of product!). I do promise it will be worthwhile--it's a huge freebie and it just keeps getting bigger. I also may have some opportunities for testers of a new set of products, so leave me a comment if you are interested or keep an eye on my Facebook page for more information about that.
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Students with autism and related disabilities often struggle with self-regulation. They have meltdowns and catastrophic reactions to seemingly small things. These calm down tools can help any students relax and handle changes or frustrations with social stories and visual supports. Find out more in this post.
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The FBA is only as useful as the plan that comes out of it. Without a functional plan that is based on the FBA, having the best FBA in the world won't help you. And yet it is clear that this is one of the hardest steps in the process. Last time I talked about what behavior plans are and are not. While the format of the plan should always be secondary to its functionality, I thought I would share some tips for putting the plan together along with a freebie format that I often use to create plans. One of the primary considerations in developing a behavior support plan is to make sure that it is based on the hypotheses that you developed in your FBA. Without that connection, it isn't going to work. So many people do an FBA and write the behavior support plan and don't connect the two. You need to be able to DIRECTLY connect the two so I wanted to share an easy way to do that.
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
I know we have been talking about expressive vocabulary, but I have to take a brief time out to reiterate my passion for age-appropriate tasks / vocabulary. If you work with students with developmental disabilities, you know the challenge of making materials that are appropriate for both developmental skills and chronological age. This can be tough for some students, but it is my passion. If students like things that are younger than their age, that's absolutely fine. I mean, after all, I've seen Frozen--have you? However, I believe we have a responsibility to introduce them to age-appropriate activities. Older students have the right to dignity and to not have their classrooms look like a preschool class. Conversely, thought that doesn't mean their environments and materials have to drab and boring. Even basic skills can be age-appropriate but interesting. While materials for younger children may not be appropriate for older students, many materials designed for older students would be appropriate for younger students. So, what do we need to think about in creating materials that are age-appropriate across the board and still at a basic developmental level? First, the vocabulary has to be appropriate. We only have so much time to teach--let's focus on what the students most need to learn. This is one of the focuses of a shift to a life skills or functional curriculum approach. It's also why we teach the Dolch list (or other sight word list) to young children. Young children are most likely to encounter the words from those lists when reading. For students who are not strong readers, we often make a shift to what we call environmental print. Environmental print are the words we see around us. Same goes for spoken vocabulary. If we are teaching receptive (for discrimination on a speech generating device or picture exchange system) vocabulary, we need to focus on what the person would want to ask for or what they need to understand. What are the things around them they would ask for or talk about? Second, the materials have to be appropriate. That means we need simple tasks, like matching skills, that use real-life vocabulary that doesn't look too, too cutesy. I firmly believe that older students deserve interesting and colorful materials, just like younger students. However, we would want the characters in books to be 15, 20 or 30 years old, instead of 3. Somehow the field seems to think that to make things simple and "older" the materials have to be less colorful and interesting. I don't see why that is true--I like colorful thing and I'm "older." We shouldn't have to fight for the right to have interesting materials for older students! So that brings me to my quest for interesting, colorful, and meaningful materials across the age span and my newest product of matching skills. And I've made a video (which was supposed to keep me from writing a whole blog post, but you know me!) about it, what's in it and what it's good for. Here's a brief description and then check out the video to see what is included. New Product This is a set of file folders that focuses on matching picture to picture for a variety of real-life, functional items. The pictures are a combination of photographs and clip art. The set includes matching picture to picture for community signs, fruits, vegetables, fast food items, meat, sweets/desserts, furniture and clothes. It also includes word-to-picture matching for signs, fruits and vegetables. The items can be divided up as one folder for each set of vocabulary (10 matching pages/file folders). They can also be set up to begin teaching students how to sort by having different items on each side (e.g., fruits and vegetables; clothes and furniture; fruit and vegetables picture match to words). There are labels for 14 file folders combinations. You can check them out in my store HERE. Until next time,
When we talk about teaching replacement behaviors for attention seeking to reduce challenging behaviors, it's important that we set it up to be successful.
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This is a review of some fall autism classroom activities to help build a set of go-to tasks to keep students engaged.
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Last time I talked about some beginning considerations in replacement skills. Today I want to talk about one of the most common type of replacement skills: communication skills. Functional Communication Training (FCT) is teaching specific
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For more in the Visual Schedule Series, see this series of posts.
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One of the most important elements of teaching language and communication is making sure that we create many, many opportunities to practice it throughout the day. Language is something that you have to practice and use in order for it to maintain. Practicing it in many situations and in many different ways increases the likelihood that it will generalize and maintain. I generally like to get at least 5 opportunities to practice at least one communication or language skill in each activity of the day. I use a data sheet (download it free here) to plan out the communication goals across the day and the 5 boxes remind everyone to create those opportunities. This also allows me to see if I need to provide more training on how to create opportunities when the boxes aren't filled in. In addition to supporting communication of the students, the strategies below also serve as visual cues to the adults to create the opportunities.
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Discover 5 expert tips for creating an ideal classroom setup to support ADHD and ASD students. Optimize their learning environment today.
This is a huge bundle of resources to create FIVE PHONICS BINDER CENTERS. The resource includes directions, ideas, and materials to create five unique centers. All of the materials can fit inside a binder for easy storage on a shelf. This is a new addition to my classroom and is perfect for independent work with an academic spin! The bundle includes: 1. Binder Spines (2 versions -- with numbers and without numbers for more flexibility) 2. Student Schedule 3. Center Materials - Word Boggle - Roll and Rhyme - Stamping Letters - Syllable Sort - CVC Word Search 4. Student Direction Sheets for each center 5. Ideas for increasing or decreasing difficulty level ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CLICK THE STAR TO FOLLOW ME FOR NEWS ON FREEBIES AND SALES! INSTAGRAM PINTEREST FACEBOOK
I was observing a little guy in preschool who had just entered school the other day. He was still working on basic skills like following directions and had limited things that he could do to engage himself independently. The teacher was working on having him do a simple put-in task of putting cards in a coffee can, but because his skills were so limited, he was completing this task repeatedly throughout his day. This wasn't the only thing he was doing and there was time in the day when he was working on discrete trials for learning readiness skills, learning to wait his turn, and working on communication through a number of activities in his day. However, one way that he was working on communicating was to use the coffee can task, that he seemed to enjoy, to have him request the cards to put in from other students. That got me thinking about one of my pet subjects over the years--creating put-in tasks that are age-appropriate and have some variety for learners who are just starting to gain other skills. These are typically the types of tasks that we start work systems with because they are easy for students to do independently. You can see from the picture a variety of types of tasks and materials you can use. I particularly like the seasonal tasks like the jack-o-lanterns that the students is putting in for 1-1 correspondence (a little more advance than just putting in).
DISCLAIMER: This post contains Amazon affiliate links for some products described below.
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Using environmental print to navigate the world and interact with others is a critical life skill. Here are some tips for writing goals for them.
Contingency maps are a cognitive-behavioral method for helping an individual to understand the consequences of behavioral choices. They are particularly useful for teaching individuals to use functionally equivalent behaviors as alternatives to problem behavior.
I was reading a discussion in a forum online recently in which a parent or teacher (I don't remember which) asked for advice about how to teach reading to students with autism. The forum was
This strategy goes by many names and while there may be some differences in the application of it for different fields, I'm of the mind that the essential elements (though the language used to describe them) are basically the same. So you will see it described as communication temptations, situational sabotage, natural environment teaching (NET), incidental teaching, Pivotal Response Training (PRT) and probably others I can't think of at the moment. However, the focus of them all is the same: to create an opportunity that motivates the learner to communicate something.
The next dollar up strategy teaches students how to make change and allows students to be more independent in the community. Find out how in this post.
Many autism and self-contained teachers think that their classrooms don't need autism lesson plan activities.
Last time I talked about some beginning considerations in replacement skills. Today I want to talk about one of the most common type of replacement skills: communication skills. Functional Communication Training (FCT) is teaching specific
Hello! I'm Chris Reeve. Welcome to our special educator community. My passion is bringing special educators together to help them serve their students. Join our FREE Resource Library ! ! ! Subscribe I Agree to
Earlier in this series, I talked about things to avoid when giving directions in discrete trial training (DTT). One of those was giving away the answer with your direction. Today I want to focus on 7 things you may be doing in your presentation of instructions and materials that may be giving away undermining your teaching. Essentially they teach the student to attend to the wrong thing.
So in my last post I talked about why people perseverate. Let's face it, we all do it. We just (sometimes) know what situations it is appropriate for. Our students often don't. So, what can you do to address verbal perseverations? I want to share 4 strategies that can be used effectively as well as some examples and then I have two freebies for you to try. Clearly which strategy you try will depend on the function of the behavior, as I talked about last time, as well as what works for you, the student, and the situation.
