The other day, I came across this awesome student reflection page by Inspire Me, ASAP! I’m always looking for ways to help students gain awareness over their actions as well as insight into their strengths and weaknesses. I love that this is cute, brief, and provides a visual indicator rather than a number scale. My younger students do so much better with pictures! Want to add it to your toolbox? Click the images below to get them for free!
Enjoy!
Many kids have a lot of difficulty changing from one activity to another during the school day. Add to that Autism, ADHD, or another disorder and you’ve got the scene set for distractions, tantrums, and frustration.
I’m not sure what it is about this time of year – maybe it’s the fact that it’s too cold to go outside (at least here in Illinois!), that the sun isn’t out nearly enough, or just that routines are getting boring for some kids now, but I feel like February and March are two of the most difficult months to get through as educators!
To help fight the transition blues, here is a list of some ways to spice up and tighten up classroom transitions to help keep things moving in the right direction!
1. Establish a consistent schedule or routine for the student to follow.  As unpredictable as the school day can be, consistency can go a long way in reducing anxiety or disorder in transitions, especially for students with disabilities.
2. Adjust students’ schedules to have the fewest amount of transition times possible. For example, if a student is already out of class to go to P.E. or Music,  it may be a good time to schedule social work or speech-language time in order to reduce the number of transitions in and out of the classroom. Another option would be to provide push in therapy services to avoid transitioning in and out of the room. On the other hand, if improving transitions is a skill a student is working on, gradually increasing the number of transitions during the day as they can tolerate them may be important.
3. Provide visuals for the students to follow. Not only does this help students with diagnoses such as Autism, but it helps most other students as well! I’ve written some information about visual transition timers in a previous post about Autism here. You can buy a bunch online or make your own!
4. Â Before an activity begins, be sure a student understands what is expect of him or her at transition time. This may take a few times of role playing and practicing the transition. For example, after a student is somewhat familiar with a routine, the conversation might go like this:
Me: “Johnny, I’m going to set my timer for 5 minutes for your break. When it goes off, it will be time to clean up and go back to your classroom.
Johnny: “I know.”
Me: “So how much time do you have?”
Johnny: “5 minutes.”
Me: “What happens when the timer goes off?”
Johnny: “I go back to class.”
Me: “Perfect! Enjoy your break!” [set the timer]
5. Give verbal and/or physical cues before transitioning to an activity. Depending on the age and needs of the student, I like using at least a 5 and 1 minute warning.
6. Sing songs or chants to signal transitions. Use the same songs each time so children can anticipate what is to happen next. Here are a few of my favorites:
7. Keep it simple with directions for the transition.  Concise one or two-step directions are often the most effective.
8.  Positive reinforcement! If a student did a good job transitioning, reward them with praise, a high-five, a smile, etc. Students often learn about appropriate behavior by watching what happens when other students perform well or not.
9. Â Scaffold as skills improve. As a student demonstrates increased competence, gradually pull back the support you give. Fade and reduce any verbal or physical prompts to all the student to transition as independently as possible.
10. Â If changes need to be made, give feedback quickly and move on. Don’t dwell on the negatives or allow them to take over the next 10 minutes! The more you delay the start of the next activity, the more a student learns that if they don’t transition well, you’ll get wrapped up in the drama and they can avoid transitioning even more!
This week was one of those weeks for me! Regardless of how hard I tried to sit and write IEP goals, do my medicaid billing, or lesson plan for next week, I just couldn’t! Now granted, this week was our parent-teacher conference week, which meant we were at work until 7 (and I couldn’t go home in between school and conferences because I live 45 minutes away), but still. My attention was definitely not what I wanted it to be this week.
Instead, I found myself wanting doing other “less cognitively demanding” things instead: delivering forms for students to have parents sign and return, checking in with a few teachers regarding my student progress, laminating and cutting out some new TpT things, etc. Throughout this week, I couldn’t help but think several times how we as adults have a ton of different options for clearing our heads during the day, but many of our students don’t have many of those options!
As adults, we can get up and walk to the bathroom if we need a minute or two to give ourselves a break. We can also decide to procrastinate or rearrange the order of our tasks during the day depending what we’re in the mood for. We can even listen to music, send a friend a message about dinner plans or, heaven forbid, take a quick look at Facebook). Our students can’t! It’s no wondering problems with work completion, following directions, or paying attention are the most common things I have teachers asking me for help with!
In college, I took a class that talked a lot about neurological research and how to improve memory. And one of the things my professor mentioned was that people always remember the first and last thing they learn in a given segment of time. So…if you’re teaching a class for 35 minutes, chances are they’ll remember about the first and last 3 minutes. However, if you teach a class for 10 minutes, break for 2, teach for 10, break for 3, teach for 10, they’ll remember the first and last 3 minutes of EACH of the teaching segments.
So when teachers need help with a student who struggles to focus, Â one of the first things I do is talk about brain breaks. I’ve heard all kinds of statistics about how long students of various ages can pay attention, but the bottom line is that it’s MUCH MUCH shorter than you’d think. The purpose of brain breaks is to provide some type of physical and/or mental time-out so that students can return refreshed to their tasks a few minutes later. Many are physical in nature (do 10 jumping jacks, crab walk, etc.), but they can be mental as well (say the alphabet backwards as fast as you can, summarize what I just said to your partner, etc.). Ultimately, anything that gives your students a chance to do something DIFFERENT for a few minutes will work. And while It doesn’t last more than 2 or 3 minutes, I’m always amazed how much of a difference it makes when I use them in my room!
Recently, I put a brain breaks card pack in my TpT Store, or you can get here. I thought I’d already written a post about it, but I hadn’t, so I’m sorry about that! It contains 33 different ideas (in color and in printer-friendly black and white) for helping your kids get out of their seats and move around. They’re presented in Powerpoint format so you can print them out many different sizes to fit your needs!
