Category: Special Education

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Tips & Tricks :: Visuals for Students with Autism

Siblings Taking a Picture

One of the most effective interventions for students with Autism is using visuals. Yet whether your school district uses PECS, Boardmaker, Microsoft Office Clipart, or my personal favorite…Google Images, the process of searching for and resizing images can easily eat a big chunk out of your day.

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Visual Schedule

Classroom Rules

And since none of us have lots and lots of time laying around, I was really excited when a special education teacher in our district shared this site with me! It’s called ConnectAbility and on the site there’s an awesome tool called Visuals Engine. The Visuals Engine contains thousands of images you can choose, and what I really love is that they’re REAL images. Then, you can select page layouts of 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, or 16 images per page – the site automatically resizes all your images to be the same size! You can also add in whatever text you want to accompany your images (or leave it blank). After you create your page of visuals you can choose to either print the page or save it as a PDF. There’s nothing worse than spending all your time making visuals for a student only to have them lose all the pieces by Friday! Since you can save your work super easily, it can be a huge time saver.

Here’s a page I made with 12 images per page. This took me less than 2 minutes!

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Hopefully this will help you save a few minutes while allowing you to make great visuals for your students!

Enjoy!

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Fun Freebie :: 45 Classroom-Friendly Fidgets

rubber bands

Recently, I’ve been on the quest for fidgets that teachers won’t throw a fit when I give their students. Come on, we’ve all been there. 🙂 Well, luckily, I found this awesome freebie on TeachersPayTeachers from Snagglebox that gives great ideas all about different types of fidgets!
Fidget Toys

Here’s another idea for a fidget!

While I was working through school this week, I noticed several of my more energetic students sporting a good 5-10 rubber band bracelets. It’s amazing how you can wait 10 years, start making friendship bracelets out of rubber bands, change their name, and all of a sudden, the boys like making them even more than girls! While they were standing in line, my students were spinning them, twisting them, and rolling them in their hands. Natural fidgets! Now of course, teachers have had to set ground rules about them (no making bracelets during class, no sling- shooting rubber bands, etc.), but what do we NOT have to make rules about at school?

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What fidgets do you have that work well for your kids??

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New(ish) Product :: Gradebook Pages

Cover

If you were around this July and August, you might have seen my summer project: an organization binder for the special ed. teachers, social workers, SLP’s, etc. I’d seen so many cute teacher binders on Pinterest and TpT, but felt that none of them really addressed all the IEP craziness the rest of us tend to do! As part of that full binder, I made some grade book pages. However, I quickly realized that lots of regular classroom teachers may enjoy these, but might not use the full binder.

Thus came the individual grade book pages! They’re presented in landscape and portrait orientations and match the cute color scheme of the rest of the binder. And since they’re in Microsoft Work format, you can add and remove as many rows as you need! So, if you’re looking for a way to spruce up your same old red grade book, head on over and take a look here!

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