Imitation: Level 1 in the VB-MAPP

'Tis the season to administer the VB-MAPP!

Not only is it the time of year for all those fun holidays, it is also the time for assessing our students and their skills. By now, we should have an idea of where our kiddos are and what will motivate them to participate in the assessment. Complete those VB-MAPPs by Thanksgiving break and then re-administer at the end of the year before summer... and be amazed at all the progress! This is the FUN part of taking data!

I plan on posting data sheets for each section of the VB-MAPP (as needed) over the next few weeks as I finish up testing my students. Today, I present you with a data sheet to test all Imitation goals in Level 1. Happy Election Day! (which counts as a holiday because it was a teacher work day :)

DOWNLOAD HERE!!

Again, this is an awesome resource provided by my wonderful place of employment!

Tact List for the VB-MAPP

This is a resource offered by the Department of Special Education at the county public school I work in. It is great and has a complete list of 1,110 words separated into categories such as Colors, Animals, Letters, Emotions, Community Helpers, Toys, and many more! Some really awesome teachers put it together so I am hoping that their hard work will pay off by having many other people share in using it!

Although the title says to use it for testing tacts on the VB-MAPP, it can also be used to think of ideas that your students can mand for. It would be great for coming up with items to use for teaching feature, function, class... and more!

For those who are new to VB-MAPP and verbal behavior lingo in general, a tact is a fancy word for "label" and mand is a fancy word for "request".

So if you were to point to a yellow fruit and say, "What is that?" to your student and he correctly answers, "banana" - he has made a successful tact! If a banana was sitting on the table and your student pointed to it and said "banana" because he was hungry and it happened to be snack time... you could probably assume he is making a mand :)

Eventually, we want those words in that list to be accompanied with other words and carrier phrases, etc. Such as this tact: "I see a monkey eating an abnormally tiny banana" (okay, if your young student with autism says this, call me and tell me what your secret is!) or a mand: "Can I have a banana for breakfast?"

HERE IS THE DOWNLOAD!!!

Edit: There were some formatting issues when putting into Google Docs. I am assuming this is because it is an Excel doc but once you download it to your own computer, it should work just fine!

Know Your Role!

Not exactly accurate for the speducator type but alas, there is no "what I think I do" meme out there for us! Who wants to take the lead on that?

A co-worker passed on a document today with job descriptions of the most involved people in your preschool autism classroom. At least for our school system, this is the list of people who are in direct contact with the students on a very regular basis and what their roles are. The list is short and very simple but gives an overview of who does what in the classroom. There are many other things I would like to add to the list but those are specific to my classroom and I think that anyone could take this list and adapt it to what best meets their needs.

I also think it's important to note that the responsibilities of the instructional assistant are also 100% the teacher's responsibilities. For example discrete trial teaching, data taking, ...and toilet training/diapering (because we don't want them to have all the fun, now do we! :-).

Make sure you go over these responsibilities with the staff that work directly with your students so that everyone is on the same page about what is expected of one another. You should also note particular things that you want to see happen in your classroom that they might not know otherwise. This will facilitate a smoother working environment!

DOWNLOAD HERE!

A Zoo Book!

I decided to do a zoo theme for the first month of school this year and am really excited about all the fun animal things we have been doing (mainly because I participated in a life changing experience on vacation this summer where I HAND-FED A GIRAFFE which only confirmed my obsession for the awkwardly beautiful creatures).

I wanted to share a book that I made and give you some ideas on how to use this book. I saw a cutesy little song about going to the zoo where you sing "I went to the zoo one day, zoo one day, zoo one day... I went to the zoo one day and I saw a ____" and you fill in the blank with a zoo animal. What I did was print each page, laminate them, and then hole punch each at the top and bind them using a metal book ring. 

IDEAS:

- Print extra pictures of each animal, laminate them, and use adhesive Velcro on the back of each picture to have them match and attach the pictures to each page. You can do an activity where you hold up a page from the book and put out 3-5 photos in front of the student. Tell them to match the correct animal.

- Sing the song while showing the page and have the student fill in the blank by saying what the animal is

- Have them identify the animals (expressively - "What animal is this?" and receptively - "Show me the panda")

- Sing the song, filling in the animal and then have them find the correct page (or photo if you want to place the photos in an array in front of the student during a table activity)

- Have them match plastic animal toys to the pages

- Have them match non-identical pictures to the photos of the animals (you can use google images/Boardmaker and print off various pictures of the animals, including cartoon pictures, etc)

- Have them identify the colors of the animals (and even match the environment that they live in, the stripes or spots on their fur, etc. depending on the cognitive level of your student)

This is a preview page from the book... which you can download for free HERE!!!

*Just a note... I did get these images from the good ol' interwebs and saw the song idea on a site that I cannot remember the name of. If you see something included in my book that deserves to be tagged with a link to where it originated from, please leave a cordial comment or email and I will give it the rightful props!

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)