Hi, I’m Jen from Speech Universe, and I am so excited to be
doing a guest post for Kristin!
I work at a school that has three self-contained Autism
Spectrum Disorder (ASD) classrooms. The
school social worker and I were looking at ways to consolidate 18 students who
typically were seen one on one twice a week.
We knew that we wanted to start some groups to work on social
language. We have quite a range of
students. They are K-5th
grade, and range from completely non-verbal, to verbal (lots of PECS, devices,
and phrase speech in between). The first
year we started working together, we began doing “Fun Fridays” in one of the
classrooms. We would typically bring in
a game and a snack to make. We worked
with the whole class (six students), the paraprofessionals, and the classroom
teacher. Some days it got a little noisy
and crazy! The kids were having fun, but
we realized quickly that there were too many cooks, and not enough learning
going on. The following year, we decided
to stray from our original plan of working with everyone at one time, and broke
down the classrooms a bit by ability.
We also started to use a repetitive “formula” for our sessions. Both of these ideas have worked out really
well.
We have broken our classes up into “higher level” groups,
and “lower level” groups. Each group
contains 3-4 students. The “higher
level” students are verbal, however struggle with answering questions, and
participating in conversational exchanges.
The “lower level” students are typically non-verbal or minimally
verbal. Most of them have either a PECS
book, or a high tech communication device.
We do not currently have any students on a high tech communication
device that fall into our “higher level”; however we have in the past.
A typical group for our “higher level” students looks like
this:
1.
Feelings
Check-In: The social worker created a
visual choice board for feelings. The
students pick how they are feeling at that time and put it onto the sentence
strip. Students are able to pick from 10
different feelings and create sentences.
They have all started to state their feelings quickly and sometimes
without the visuals now! Please see the
end of this post for a FREEBIE!
Conversation : This year, we have decided to
really focus on conversations, or asking questions of peers. We
have been using visuals I made for conversations. These have been really great with our
students. The activity consists of five
visual boards that have all of their favorite items in categories. The categories we have really focused on are:
toys, food, animals, colors, and tv shows.
They have started to ask each other questions about their favorite
things and waiting for the answers. We
have really encouraged them to get their peers attention by using their names
and orienting their bodies toward each other.
I
apologize that I cannot give the conversation board away as a freebie. We often use Boardmaker symbols, and they do
not allow people to give away products that include their images. You can find the conversation activity that
we use HERE.
Turn Taking Game: We have had a lot of fun
playing turn taking games. We play any
kind of turn taking game that we can find (or that I steal from my kids at
home). Some examples of games we have
played are: Gone Fishing, Zingo, Don’t Break the Ice, Go Fish, and a touch and
feel box. They also LOVE a Marble Castle
game that the social worker has. During
these games, we focus on orienting toward each other, requesting turns,
requesting parts of the game, and sharing.
Another big part that we focus on is WAITING! We always have visuals on hand for our
games. We can usually print out the
visuals pretty quickly on Boardmaker.
The biggest visual we use is the WAIT card.
A typical session for our “lower level”
students looks like this:
1.
Feelings
check-in. For these guys we usually
offer a choice of two or three feelings words.
Typically we offer ‘happy, sad, and hungry.’ They love picking ‘hungry’ because then that
usually leads to them requesting a snack with their communication book or
device (and us playing grandma and giving in to the request).
2.
Simple turn taking game. We are just starting to introduce these with
these groups. We usually make it around
about two times in the group before they get really restless and we need to
switch activities. We use the same games
as above, but may adapt them a bit more.
3.
Requesting!
We usually have a third person with us who can act as a silent
prompter. We focus a lot on the PECS
model of requesting. We have been so
excited with the results! I bring in my
big box of reinforcing toys with all of the visual icons printed out for each
one. Students are then able to pick what
they want to play with, and then we start making them request the items. Our students range from requesting one item
on the front of the book, to requesting using the three word sentence “I want
____.”
It has been such a rewarding experience working closely with
the school social worker. I think we
both learn things from each other every day.
Our groups continue to be a work in progress, but I think the students
are really benefitting from all of our experimenting.
Here is my FREEBIE! It is an example of a feelings check-in
sheet you could use. This one does not
contain Boardmaker pictures, the graphics are from mycutegraphics.com and graphics factory.com. You can find the feelings check-in sheet HERE at
my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Thank you so much for reading my really long post! I am so excited to share what I have been
doing, and really feel like I didn’t even share everything! If you have any questions, please contact me
at: speechuniverse@gmail.com or
go to my Facebook page- https://www.facebook.com/speechuniverse
Thank you, Kristin for allowing me to share on your blog!
