Temporary Quarantine

Our district has had a plan in place in case we had to have specific classes quarantine.  I was hoping my class wouldn't have to do this, but alas, we had a direct exposure and we were moved to remote learning for our quarantine period.

I searched for social stories to help my students understand what was happening, but didn't find one that directly supported our situation.  I adapted Going Back to Distance Learning from Autism Little Learners to create one that made sense for our situation.

I also made some simple visuals on our calendar to help the students see how many more days of zoom lessons we would have and when we would return to school.  

Funny is Funny

I've worked with the paraprofessional I am assigned with for the last four years.  She is amazing.  Every year within one of our social skills lessons we talk about things we like and don't like.  This leads us into how different people have different opinions.  Which in turn leads us to lessons on respect, caring  and tolerance.

Every year, my para tells the kids how she does not like frogs.  We live in Florida.  Once during the rainy season, she was laying on her couch reading her book and a frog that got into her house jumped on her face.  She tells the story and the kids laugh but for the most part understand why she doesn't like frogs anymore.

This year I have a little girl who is very bright and on the autism spectrum.  She and I do a lot of social stories to help her learn new skills.  Her mom sent me this link because Mrs. B.  (my para) has to watch this video.  According to our student  "we can teach her to like frogs again.  They're not bad.   They can be our friends."

We cracked up laughing when we watched the link.

Social Stories Made Easy

Several of my students have made gains through the use of Social Stories. A social story is designed to teach a student specific details about a social situation so that when the situation naturally occurs, he/she has some strategies and vocabulary to deal with it. For more information on social stories check out wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stories

Another special education blog recently posted an article about using comic book formats to create social stories. What a great idea!
http://teachinglearnerswithmultipleneeds.blogspot.com/2008/04/comic-books-for-social-stories.html


The site that I particularly like from this post was: http://www.pikikids.com/ps/home

I was playing with it earlier this week. I already have some digital photos on my computer and just followed the instructions to upload some for a social story on task support. I used pictures of a particular student working with me hand over hand on a fine motor task, working next to my assistant and working in a center by himself. Then there is a place to click on speech bubbles to add text. I just added one sentence to each picture about the work task.

It's relatively easy and only took about 15 minutes to complete. The thing I spent the most time on was trying to figure out how to print it.
scroll on the right and there is a print menu box
click "download"
it will open a jpeg image and then print.

Also...IMPORTANT...when you finish the social story sequence, there is a link that toggles between "make my comic public" and "make my comic private." You most likely want to click the private one.