Are you working with students who have Autism? Students with transition issues? Or just students period. Lots of different types of kids can struggle with having to transition from activity to activity. It is a very unstructured process that isn’t good for everyone. What can you do? Try these transitions strategies to stop meltdown when it’s time to move on.
Dear Readers and Friends, I need help. Like so many others in the Greater Houston area, I nearly fell to my knees this morning… Read More »Hurricane Harvey Help
You take your students out on a Community Based Trip and they… well, they stick out. You work in the classroom all the time to get your students to interact in socially appropriate ways, but it’s just not sticking when you get out in public. What can you do?
Kids with Autism who get a poor night’s sleep often have problems with behaviors at school- that may be aggression and agitation, social withdrawal and isolation, or even sleeping in school. So what to do? This is a conversation worth having with parents, and may help you get through your day a little better!
So things are going well, and then they aren’t.
When you have students with behaviors in the classroom it can set off everything and everybody.
It gets out of control, FAST!
“I have a student with some pretty bad behaviors.
How do you reward the good behavior if he’s also doing bad behaviors at the same time?”
-Allison H.
I feel you Allison. You want to reward a student for not hitting except he is pulling your hair (that, by the way, actually happened to me). Just today I was trying to praise a student for sitting while he pulled on my clothes and arms (*ouch*).
So, what do you do?
–
–
I will never, never forget a community trip with students to Taco Bell back in the day. My two paraeducators and I took about 10 severely disabled students out to eat. It took some time to get everyone through the line and I will never forget helping my favorite student, Cameron. I helped him get his food and walked him to a table. There were two more students I had to get through the line, so I left him to wait until I could come back and help him open his packages, cut up his food, and help feed him (because of limited mobility due to his severe Cerebral Palsy). I went back to the line and returned to him about 4 minutes later… and he was eating.
I asked my para team if they had helped him. Both said no. I looked at Cameron.
“Who opened that for you?” He looked at me and laughed.
“I did,” he said.
My mouth dropped open. He has opened his taco and was eating- he had even opened up a packet of hot sauce and poured it on… and here we were opening everything and even feeding him!
Read More »Learned Helplessness in Students With Disabilities
I was in a classroom a few years ago and the student was like the ball in a pinball machine! He was up and moving during my entire observation. There were moments where he could be cajoled into sitting and attending to a task, but they were few (very few), far between, and super short. The teacher looked at me needing help. Her job had become an exhausting workout.
I left and came back the next day with a few ideas and some fidget toys. Guess what… it helped.
“I have a student in my class with pretty severe behaviors- he hits his head a lot. Like all the time. I feel bad when he goes home some days with huge red marks on his face, but I’m not sure what to do to get him to stop. What can I do?”
– Kenneth J.
Kenneth, I feel you. It is pretty hard as a teacher to sit back and watch a kid seriously hurt themselves. Head banging in Autism is actually very common. There are a handful of tricks you can try to lessen the rate and severity of head-hitting, but first you want to try to figure out the reason behind the hitting.
Presume Competence in Autism Units or Self-Contained A few years ago I was in a classroom where a new student enrolled that morning. They pushed… Read More »Presume Competence Autism
