Circle Time - Skill Building cheat sheet freebie!

Hi Everyone!

I have several emails from people who are asking for more of those cheat sheet curriculum planning guides like I have here for meal time.

So I am posting the one that our special education department has sent out for my program at work for circle time. It's a good one! Enjoy :)

Here is the download!!

My November Newsletter - includes tips for parents!

Hi Everyone!

I just finished up a newsletter to send out to my parents this Friday and thought I would share it! This week we had an open house and parents were asking about ways that they can implement strategies we use in the classroom at home. I am so excited that parents want to learn more about ABA! Having families involved in early intervention is one of the best ways to both increase and generalize the skills that we are teaching our students.

I always try to emphasize how important discrete trial teaching is when I give tips on how to use ABA in the home. This kind of approach to teaching skills works for all people, not just children with autism! However, when trying to research what discrete trial teaching is, it can be very overwhelming when you aren't familiar with ABA terminology. I crafted a simple chart and found a Google image to illustrate how ABC (antecedent, behavior, consequence) works. I am hoping that this is helpful for my parents and that it will be of use to my readers as well!

The download is a Word document so that you can edit it to meet your needs. Enjoy!

Here is the download!

Embedding Targets During Meal Times

In my last post I shared how I embedded language/behavior targets for a back to school art activity. As educators, we are responsible for being intentional with our activities and knowing what our goals are for those activities. I don't write traditional lesson plans and instead use curriculum planning sheets to prepare how I want to execute a lesson. Today I am including a curriculum planning sheet for embedding targets during meal times. I keep this posted near the table where the students eat so that my staff and I have a constant reminder of what we can target during meals. It is not necessary to try and tackle every single target for every single meal (unless you are just super ambitious and have very willing students!). Pick the important ones for individual students and work from there. I have curriculum sheets for many other parts of our day but decided to share the meal time one first since I think it can often be a forgotten part of our day for useful language training. It is tempting to take a break and relax during meal times but time is everything in early intervention and we only have so much of it!

Meal Time Planning Sheet can be downloaded here!!!