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By Fenfer25

I had a couple of autistic students last year. The one thing that you have to have is structure and consistency. Any change in the day, can really upset them. Visuals are a must as the above post mentioned. They want
to know what is going on ahead of time.

My student had a feeling thermometer. It went from 0 to 5. You would want for him to be at a 3. But one of the problems that autistic students have is dealing with their emotions. If he was above a 3 he had some choices of tasks to help him calm down. The one that worked the best was putting together interlocking cubes. It worked every

time. The nice thing about it was that once he cooled down, he was fine. It was also hard for him to verbalize his feeling, so if he showed me he was above a 3 I would tell him to choose a task. We made him a task board. There was clip art of different activities attached with velcro and he would tear off the task of his choice and give it to me. Tasks might be: blocks, reading, drawing, etc.

He had difficulty with organization. So one of the interventions we implemented was to bind all of their subject folders together. This helped to be sure that everything was all together. They would both become frustrated if they could not find something.

The best intervention was to have a set of green and red stickers. These stickers were for homework. Green meant "for homework", red meant "stay home". He would lose his homework and become upset or papers were coming home and the student didn't know what they were for. Yes, we went over it in class, but the colored stickers helped him be more organized and remember what was homework. It relieved a lot of stress at home and at school.

Dismissal was tough for him too. We had p.e. at the end of the day. When we came back, we would grab our backpacks and line up. He was scared he was going to miss the bus and would have an anxiety attack. So, we allowed him to pack his backpack early and take it with him to p.e. He was dismissed by the p.e. teacher and this solved the problem. It takes a team effort sometimes.

Talk with parents, past teachers, and hopefully you will be given opportunities to attend staff development. It was a challenging year, but I loved them both! Both of my students were exceptionally gifted and were able to grasp concepts taught in class rather quickly.

It is also important that if you do not have an aid to help out that you make a plan for if the unexpected happens. If they are not able to calm down, what then? Is there a place where they can go to calm down. Any day that was not a "normal" day...you should come up with interventions...just in case.