Hi! I am Allison. I am an Intervention Specialist and Certified Autism Specialist with nearly 20 years of experience working with students with autism and low-incidence disabilities.
I taught in an elementary special education classroom where I created countless individualized supports, organizational tools, and differentiated activities for my students before transitioning to my current position on an autism and low-incidence coaching team where I have had the pleasure of meeting and helping teachers in hundreds of classrooms in the Dayton, Ohio area. I am passionate about special education and helping teachers!
Do your students struggle to participate during Morning Meeting? 🌅🌅
|
Hi Reader! For several years, I gathered all of my students on the carpet and had them help dictate while I wrote out our morning message during morning meeting. But, I finally realized that this was a waste of time for my classroom of mostly non-readers. Once I was finished with each daily message none of my kids could re-read what I had written and it really was not meaningful at all! Plus, many of them lost focus because they did not understand what I was writing or even what I was asking. So how did I fix this?
And here is the final result 🤩: This is my Interactive Morning Message where students put up picture cards to symbolize important information about our day (such as the month, lunch, theme, group activity, etc). This has been SO much more meaningful and the best part is that my students are now more engaged because they each get a turn to put up a part of the message and the picture format is much easier for them to understand. To accompany the morning message and our calendar time, I also created Differentiated Morning Meeting visual supports. For some students, I used books with different prompts that corresponded with our message on each page. For others, I included all of the prompts on a single worksheet. If you are interested in grabbing both of these wonderful interactive resources, you can bundle them and save 20%! Until next time! |
Hi! I am Allison. I am an Intervention Specialist and Certified Autism Specialist with nearly 20 years of experience working with students with autism and low-incidence disabilities.
I taught in an elementary special education classroom where I created countless individualized supports, organizational tools, and differentiated activities for my students before transitioning to my current position on an autism and low-incidence coaching team where I have had the pleasure of meeting and helping teachers in hundreds of classrooms in the Dayton, Ohio area. I am passionate about special education and helping teachers!
Hi Reader! I always found it easy to find opportunities for the daily practice of literacy skills in my classroom. Name sequencing, sight words, vocabulary, read-alouds... we regularly did it all! 📚 But math was a different story. I found that I often compartmentalized math instruction to single bands (money, time, numeration, etc.) and it was usually during IEP or intervention time. So students were primarily working on skills at their level or related to their goals and did not get the same...
Hi Reader! Can you believe the back to school season is upon us? This was the fastest summer EVER! But I am excited for another year ahead. Some of my favorite activities this time of year include: reading No, David! by David Shannon with my students (they giggle the whole time!) 😆 creating a classroom mission statement with my students 📝 teaching essential school vocabulary with games such as scavenger hunts, vocabulary fishing, BINGO, and board games 🃏 To learn more about what Back to...
Hi Reader! In my role as an autism and low-incidence coach, I support hundreds of teachers each year. And a common concern I hear again and again is teachers feeling ill-prepared to manage their paraprofessionals in the classroom. I get it! So much of our undergraduate training focuses on working with our students (obviously!) but very little if any helps us work with our paraprofessionals! 😵💫😵💫 During my time in the classroom, I developed a variety of tools to train my paraprofessionals and...