Improve the most Challenging Behavior

March 12, 2022February 20, 2023 AutismadeLeave a comment

Being proactive is the key to avoiding a meltdown in your classroom, but you’ll need to know your students motivators, behaviors and triggers first!

Improving the most challenging behavior can be a challenge on its own ! Finding a strategy that suits individual needs can have you pulling your hair out.

Before I begin to implement any strategy I give each student a motivator assessment, keeping a note of the highest reinforcers to help them replace particular behaviors for positive ones.

When a behavior does arise, I remind the student of what went wrong with visuals which allows them a choice of what would have been a better approach in that situation. Using a “How did you feel? What did you do? What should you do next time? strategy, students are able to point and reflect what should have happened.

Once established, Positive Behavior must be managed with a consistent approach to maintain these new learnt skills.

A Simple token board in my opinion is the life saver in my classroom. I always accompany this strategy with a reward choice board, where I give my student a choice from his rewards….. (the ones he’d chosen in the motivator assessment) at the beginning of an activity. The number of tokens I use with these boards are 3, 5, 10, to use with different abilities and are given during tasks, then exchanged for the motivator.

I use Token System during all teaching and learning throughout the day!

For more information on behavior tools you can visit my TPT Store where you will find many more strategies, tips and tools!

Easter Hunt, Math Ideas for busy Classrooms

February 27, 2022February 23, 2023 AutismadeLeave a comment

I’m always looking for ways to keep my Math lessons exciting and interesting, so when holiday events come around I don’t miss the opportunity to get creative! Easter hunts are always motivating! so this activity was an easy way to introduce basic math skills such as counting to tell the number of objects and recording the amounts.

I started with Easter craft materials that I’d bought from the cheap store and made activity mats to correspond with the items. A magnify glass was a handy tool that helped them hunt through the basket, find the items on the list and matching them to the picture!

I encouraged my students to count the objects they found and say the number in order for them to understand the relationship between numbers and quantities. They were able to count and record the amounts by using the plastic number to correspond.

This activity gave my young learners a lot of fun and the chance to explore, Count and record the number of Easter items. I loved the way it kept them motivated enough to practice these skills without realising!

Click here to visit my store

Spring Math Ideas for Pre-K

February 12, 2022July 25, 2023 AutismadeLeave a comment

Spring Math ideas for my Pre-K Classroom

I’m bring Bugs to my independent Math centre! I’ve added creepy crawlers to an interactive selection of pages that cover some basic math skills that my young learners can practice and enjoy!

I’ve laminated these boards and popped them in a binder for my Kido’s to practice over and over again. For other students I print them out so they can use them as a cut and paste activities while my high level can write the answers using dry wipe markers.

These games are quick and easy to make up, simply laminate and Velcro and pop in a binder or printout for worksheets.

Matching numbers to 5 with the ladybugs

Match numbers to 5 with the caterpillar

Count and Match numbers to 5 with the bees

Ordering numbers to 5

Order numbers to 5

Find the missing number to 5

Counting to 5

Sequencing bugs

plus more games and matching pieces

How to Use Social Narratives for Behavior Management

February 5, 2022August 11, 2023 AutismadeLeave a comment

Social narratives are always available in my calm down area! I keep them on the book shelf ready to remind my young learners how to respond in difficult social situations. This type of visual guide describes social interactions helps with understanding social skills and cues that they might of missed.

Social supports help my young learners understand how to behave or respond in particular situations by using visuals to describe various social interactions, situations, behaviours, and skills.

The main goal of a Social narrative is to share social information that describes how to behave in them instances.

Reading these stories, one to one and as a whole class lesson has enabled me to reinforce these important social skills. I’ve displayed a poster on classroom rules as a quick reminder and added supporting activities to generalise learning.

“Class Rules and “Inside voice,” are the ones I often read within a class lesson, usually when a reminder is needed on how behavior affects the class and disrupts others.

I use a quick reminder booklet to reinforce outside, inside and class voices!

“Be Kind” or “Listen to your Teacher” Might be needed for individuals or to target a more tricky behavior that is reoccurring.

I use Social Strips to support the skills outlined in the stories

Using adapted Books in SPED

January 23, 2022August 11, 2023 AutismadeLeave a comment

Its not as hard as it sound to adapt any favourite book and make it interactive! You can target so many skills, like sentence starters, colour, shape, sentence structure, and sequencing, for Special Ed students.

I decided not to adapt a shop book but create and direct a version towards communication and understanding in more depth that would be more meaningful for young SPED students.

I loved simplifying these popular stories so my young learners could access them, especially Fairy-tale favourites. It was fantastic to seeing them learning to comment on what they were seeing in the book, remembering the story sequence, identifying the visuals to answer the “I can see questions, learning Story vocabulary and answer “who “questions about these characters.

I couldn’t stop incorporating more learning strategies into these story sets and added story words, (story vocab on a ring) to teach character recognition.