Get Creative - Cardboard!

One of my cuties enjoying a cardboard box!

This is a post to encourage you to just be creative with your students. If you are in a position where you just don't have that many resources available to you and you are grabbing at air to find ideas, look at the things you have lying around your house and classroom. Think about how kids are always more excited about the wrapping than they are about what's inside at Christmas... meaning, it doesn't have to be flashy and cost a lot of money to use it as a reinforcer with your students. YOU have the power to make something exciting. The same thing goes for using materials to run your language programs.

For instance, I had this huuuge cardboard box from getting something delivered at work. First we let the kids go to town with markers on it. There were so many language opportunities here! (I had them work in groups of two and used it at the language center.)

-Requesting (the color marker they want, the part of box they want to draw on)
-Positional Concepts (color the "top", "bottom", "side" of the box - put items "in", "on top", "next to" the box)
-Labeling (label the colors, shapes they/you draw, have them label "box", label positional concepts)
-Imitation (you draw a shape or a line on the box and then have them imitate, have them imitate opening box, touching parts of the box, putting items in and on top of box)
-Social Skills (have them comment on what the other is drawing, request markers from one another, label their peers and the actions their peers are doing, i.e. "Johnny is drawing a circle!" or "Sally is next to me", etc)
-Matching (match the marker colors, match shapes that you draw, match items that you put in and on top of the box)

*You can also use this as a medium to learn their colors, ABC's, and numbers as you draw on the box. SO MANY POSSIBILITIES!

The box acted as a boat for about a week and then I left it in my office for a while. Then I came across the idea to make a Star Cave. So I poked a string of Christmas lights through the top of the box and it was like an entirely new reinforcer for my students again. I would let them have access to it after successfully participating in their table top activities and they LOVED it.

Here are some other cardboard ideas if you happen to order incessantly from Amazon (like I do) and you have some creativity and extra time on your hands:

IkatBag has some awesome ideas for mailboxes, a castle, oven, and more! (note: we made the post office mail box and it was a huge hit during circle time).
Picklebums has this super cool town/roads on cardboard that I love.
Boysgerms  has an inspiring picture list of cool ideas.

So, by no means should you be building detailed and picture perfect cardboard creations. Just pull out some tape and a permanent marker and have fun with it. Once you make it fun, the kids will join in and you can encourage them to use their language and social skills.

Not to sound cliche or be a total pun but... THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!

My Buttons, My Buttons, My Fooouuurrrr Groovy Buttons!

I had to make a post about this because:

a) I want to brag about the awesome staff that work in my classroom

b) You need to be exposed to Pete The Cat (if you haven't been already!)

c) Language Boards: they are so awesome!!!

We have been reading a lot of Pete The Cat ever since my sister sent me all three books for my birthday (because classroom materials are about the best gift you can get me :). I am officially in love with Pete (and if I ever get a pet cat I vow him to be a namesake) and I just can't imagine my classroom without his books now. I don't think anything has ever been a bigger hit with the students!

The original is I Love My White Shoes which is hands-down the best one of the three. Then they came out with Pete The Cat And His Four Groovy Buttons and Rocking In My School Shoes. All three books have these extremely catchy songs that you can download fo' FREE on the Harper Collins website.

My kids go crazy for them! The illustrations are great, the songs are even better, there is counting and color identification in the books... and they all have GREAT moral lessons. Win. Win. WIN.

So the kids have really been digging the Groovy Buttons book this week... so much so that yesterday when I tried to take a class picture they kept showing me their belly buttons (it's in the book!). It was so adorable! So I threw out the idea to my two assistants to possibly make a language board to go along with the book. During the summer we get extra planning time with the students going home earlier than normal... so within HOURS my two staff had drawn, cut out, laminated, and velcro-ed this sucker up. I was floored... how lucky am I to have such talented people to work with! This language board would have taken me the rest of summer to make on my own so I am quite impressed!

Since we can't get Harper Collins to sign a deal to market this (or can we?), I figured I would pass on the awesome language board idea for my readers to replicate in their own classrooms. Language boards make storytelling interactive and fun and are great to use in group instruction. I have a variety that go along with various books I read during circle time.

 I have him with several other language boards hanging on my teacher's easel that I use during circle time. You can find the easel at Lakeshore

Everything on Pete is velcro-ed on so each student can participate and have a turn to engage in Pete's story.

And of course we cannot forget to show Pete's belly button when his shirt is removed!

Practical Autism Resources

We live in such a wonderful time to be working with kids who have special needs. Not only are educational laws, funding, and resources at an all time high for providing the best service to our students... we have the INTERNET right at our fingertips!

Now, there are some cons to this... such as having misinformed people creating websites about special education, but if you really dig around you can find some pretty incredible sites that are very helpful in creating materials for skill building in the classroom. And if you follow my blog, I will do all that digging for you. (Isn't life grand?)

I especially like Practical Autism Resources because they have a big list of materials you can print and laminate to use for several language programs (matching, receptive/expressive identification, teaching categories, feature function class, etc.) They are sorted into different folders and even give examples on how you can use them. I initially found the site while looking for anything that might help me administer the VB-MAPP (The Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program). I will talk more about the VB-MAPP in other posts but if you are working with young children with autism and have not heard of or used the VB-MAPP you really should look into it because it is specifically used to assess milestones in language. This is a great tool for determining skill deficits and will direct you in what areas are most important to write IEP goals for.

Practical Autism Resources is a huge time saver (which I think we can all agree is invaluable), let's us take a break from over-using Boardmaker, and provides other great resources such as reviews on iPad apps that work well with our population (if you're into that sort of thing), data sheets, and parent resources.

Have fun exploring this site! It isn't the most flashy, but oh my is it helpful!

Here is an example of one of the printables. You can use this for virtually ALL language programs. (We will talk more about how to do this in the future)

Free Materials = GREAT Materials

If you are a teacher, you are already aware of how often we use our own money to provide items in our classrooms. (--If you are a college student studying education/related services, just be prepared for this. Yes, you will be "underpaid" and still be using that paycheck to buy things for your job - take comfort in knowing you love your job and to be honest, having better materials equals a better day at work, so it's worth it! --If you are the parent of a student with special needs, you should consider donating to your child's classroom if you are able. Many of you already do and we appreciate the heck out of you, but just keep it in mind! :)

I frequent the Dollar Tree and Target dollar aisle for things I can use as reinforcers and skill building. I also ALWAYS say yes if someone asks me if I want something (bubble wrap? a cardboard box? yes please!). Yesterday morning my husband and I saw a sign for a yard sale and decided to walk over to check it out. I spotted this laughably large stuffed Sulley from the movie Monsters Inc. from the other side of the street and got pretty excited. Once the people hosting the sale realized I was a teacher, they were all about giving away things that I might be able to use and happily offered me the ridiculously over-sized Sulley. I also got a gallon bag full of plastic dinosaurs of all sizes and a bag full of toy cars - and not just regular cars either... the real Cars cars, like the Pixar movie ones! (Cars and Thomas the Train are unbeatable with my group)

Moral of the story is: hit up the "free" section on Craigslist, go to yard sales, check out Goodwill and other thrift stores, sign up for www.donorschoose.org, send cutesy letters home to your parents listing items you need... do what you can to fund the materials you need in your classroom. Materials are very important and they can get rather expensive.

So thank you generous neighbors for the lovely addition to my classroom! I can't wait to see the look on my students' faces on Monday when I use Sulley as a reinforcer.

my husband got conned into carrying him in the 98 degree heat for the 1/2 mile walk back to our apartment

they became good friends by the end of the walk (despite the odd stares and funny comments from the occasional passerby)

*Just a side note: I do not recommend having a collection of stuffed animals in the classroom since they can easily carry germs and are not easy to clean. I plan on keeping Sulley out of the classroom for the most part (stored in my office) and using him sparingly for reinforcement during circle time and table top activities. This means the students will be in full supervision when they are with Sulley so I will be preventing any kind of germ inducing behaviors (licking, biting, etc).

The Dead Man Test

Okay guys, here is my first post on important matters relating to educational practice and it may seem like a no-brainer to some that might read this but considering I am basing this post off of a real live student’s IEP that I read this week that was written by a real live teacher  - it needs to be said. (Now someone help me explain this to my colleague… anyone?)

Have any of you heard of the Dead Man Test*? Well, in short it means that when writing a goal for a student, you need to ask yourself if a dead man can accomplish the goal. If that answer is yes, then please (for the love of God) do NOT use that goal. Some examples might be “will not tantrum during transitions” or “will sit quietly during story time”. Yikes. Morbid a little? Yeah, I just thought of a dead man sitting in my morning circle too.

This guy passes the test.

Ahem. ANYWAY.

Now, if you google the term, a lot of special education websites come up that talk about how avoiding a goal that might be appropriately written for a dead man (again, eek) is all about the wording of the goal. The WORDING??? Maybe I have high expectations for my precious little students whose minds I am responsible for shaping and expanding… but the difference between a goal that I write for my very active and growing little guys and one more suitable for a dead man will not be the wording. No siree.

So here is the goal that inspired all this dead man talk:

“Johnny will remain within a small group setting of peers.” (By the way, poor Johnny is always getting used in any scenario we speducators* deem fit. Good ol’ Johnny and Susie. Saving us from breaching privacy acts, thanks guys!)

So… we are expecting Johnny to remain in a small group setting of peers. I do believe that goal could be accomplished by a dead man… or a stuffed animal (perhaps we should change the name to The Stuffed Animal Test?). Now, these random special education websites on Google would suggest you change the wording to avoid failing The Dead Man Test. So that could look like this:

“Johnny will choose to remain in a small group with peers”

Because if he’s choosing to stay in the group, he is committing a behavioral act. (Even though the act of “choosing” can be quite difficult to determine… not to mention - WHY is he choosing to be in the group? Is it because he likes to aggress on peers? Is it because he wants to stim on the toys that are presented in the group? This is way too vague.)          

Now, this post is going to get long so I won’t go too far into the specifics of HOW to write the goal so that it is appropriate, teachable, and attainable but I will give my quick little edit to make the goal a tad more fitting for a well written IEP. I am going to assume that the behavior I really want to see from Johnny is that he is going to interact with his peers and willingly participate with them (a social skills goal). If it was intended to be an actual sitting/attending goal, then that is something different altogether. See why this was such a terrible goal? I don’t even know what Johnny is supposed to be working on and what his skill deficit is. So my change is as follows:

“Johnny will independently initiate interactions with peers by joining a peer in play one time in a 30 minute period for 3 consecutive days out of 5 across 2 weeks”

Since I know who “Johnny” is in real life and I know that initiating interactions by joining peers is not something he is currently doing, I know that this is a skill he needs to work on. It is age appropriate (this student is 3 years old) and given my background knowledge of the student (he is aware of his peers and shows that he enjoys being around them by clapping and smiling when in group settings) I think this is an attainable and fitting goal.
The complicated criteria for mastering the goal basically means this: Over a 2 week period, he needs to have 3 consecutive days during both weeks that he is initiating play with a peer. So he has NOT mastered the goal if he has 6 days across the 2 week period that he is initiating interactions. They need to be consecutive (for each singular week) and the reason I have written that it has to be over a 2 week period is because if Johnny happens to have a particularly awesome week where he is rockin’ and rollin’ in the social skills category but comes back from the weekend and just has a mediocre week of social skills… he hasn’t mastered the goal. He may have just been really motivated by the Thomas the Train toy you introduced that week or whatever the case may be.
So here is the criteria for mastering Johnny’s current goal of “remaining with peers”:  Johnny will remain with peers on 4 out of 5 opportunities in a quarter grading period. Um… okay. To me that says we are only looking at Johnny’s skill in this area FIVE times over the quarter and hopefully he can do it 4 times out of those 5. (My head is in my hands right now, shaking sadly.)

 We need to be absolutely sure our students are actually mastering the skills we are teaching them before we move on to new ones so having solid criteria and the data to prove they mastered it is ESSENTIAL. So for now, we work on Johnny initiating interactions… next we work on helping him sustain them. Eventually we teach him how to request and comment and all that wonderful stuff we do with people every day that makes our world go ‘round!

-Please make a comment if you have questions about any of this. There are going to be many more posts on this subject because it is just far too complex to fit into a single sitting (there are whole books and trainings and classes devoted to writing IEP’s!). But I am happy to answer any questions to the best of my ability and welcome them! 

*The Dead Man Test was a concept created by Ogden Lindsley in 1965 as a rule of thumb for determining if something is a behavior. We would like to petition he change it to The Stuffed Animal Rule, but now that he himself is dead, that is impossible.

*Speducators is a term used for “special educators”. We find it to be a very scientific and professional title, so please use wisely.

Let's get my feet wet...

Hello!

After four years of urging from my husband, I have decided to take the plunge and write a blog devoted to my career. It took me this long because while I have experienced some really interesting and enlightening moments over the past few years, it has taken a lot of learning opportunities to really hack away at what I am passionate enough about to share with people who might actually invest a lunch break to sit down and check out what I am posting among millions on the internet.

TEACH EARLY AUTISM:
The name is simple and self explanatory. I teach early learners who have autism or delays in behavior/language that mimic characteristics of autism. My program uses applied behavior analysis and verbal behavior to facilitate a language intensive learning environment.

I work for one of the top school systems in the nation. The opportunity to work for this school system has been life changing - for both me and the students I will serve forever in my future (whether I stay in this school system or not). One of the main reasons I decided that it was necessary to create this blog is because I am receiving an almost unfair amount of information and trainings that could be so beneficial to people who do not have access to that level of resource.

Some things I will be covering on this blog: how to write appropriate goals and objectives on IEP’s (Individual Education Plan), how to manage and organize a preschool autism classroom, fine and gross motor strategies, helpful resources and research, lesson plans and themes to use, materials and supplies that are helpful, language and communication strategies, activity ideas, curriculum planning, and more! I will talk about inappropriate behaviors and toilet training and what transitions look like in the classroom. And of COURSE funny classroom stories will be shared J

I am excited about this new project so here goes nothing!