Primary ASD

Even though I have an in my room, I made this hallway display so that it can reach more students and adults. My classroom is right beside the office and the front entrance so there’s quite a bit of traffic always coming and going… I figured this display will give them an opportunity to practice positive affirmations while they simply read the display 🥰😝. It’s so important to foster and to our students (and ourselves), and in the form of statements is a really great way to do so!
This is just a closet door but it’s the only space available to display our work… if this were a real board and didn’t required to be opened and closed periodically, I would have put a small mirror there too :)

Here’s a little project that I took on to help organize our school’s inclusive books. At my school we realized that we had such great materials but weren’t utilizing them as best we could. We’ve been engaging in weekly, focused discussions on issues pertaining to inclusion, equity, and anti-racism and are striving to increase racial and equity literacy of staff to thereby foster a safe, positive, inclusive, and anti-racist school climate for all of our students. The goal is to have our inclusive library out in the open to foster discussions, allow teachers to easily access books to share with our students, and to frequently change the books showcased in the display case (ages k-8).
Huge shoutout to my childhood friend (literally knew him since I was 3 months old!) for making my vision a reality... I gave him measurements and he worked his creative and talented magic! We wanted to have beautiful looking bookshelves but also needed to have them be portable in case we needed to remove them to display other events throughout the school year.

Today we reread the book, “The Juice Box Bully” by Bob Sornson and Maria Dismondy and had a great class discussion about what bullying looks like, what it feels like, and what you can do when you or someone you see is being bullied. One of my favourite parts of the book is where it talks about a classroom promise… “we promise to take care of ourselves, each other, and our classroom, and to solve problems peacefully. We promised that that in this class, no one would stand by and accept bullying behaviour. When someone acts hurtfully, we all speak up”. I love that this book talks about the importance of standing up to bullying and everyone supporting one another. I also like that it acknowledges that problems are inevitable, but the key is to solving them peacefully. Here are some activities that we did for this book, all of which can be found on for . I hope you enjoy this book as much as my classr and I did.

Outdoor learning ✔️. We’re slowly getting used to this new way school life, especially with having no recess like we’re all used to and spending two periods a day doing outdoor learning. It’s definitely a learning curve but my students have been doing so incredibly well, especially given all these new routines. Can you guess what book we’re reading?! I’ll let you know in my next post 😊. ̇d19

Happy everyone! I wanted to share a book that my students have been really interested in, called “What Should Danny do?” by . It’s a book where the reader can choose between different scenarios and ultimately affect the outcome of the book. From an Autism teaching perspective, it’s a great way to have discussions about choosing to make “red choices” vs. “green choices” and talk about the resulting positive or negative consequences. It’s a great way of demonstrating the consequences that occur based on our behaviour, without having to actually engage in the positive or negative behaviour itself. Just like ’s series, there is both a home and school version of Danny. One of my students in particular has really taken a liking to the concept of the and has been independently outlining scenarios he can choose to engage in and their resulting consequences during times of escalation. I love that you can transfer the content from this book into engaging social and life competency lessons, and from a literacy perspective, you can have students create their own personal pages of to create a classroom published book! We’re going to create our own “what would room 156 do?” to further solidify the concept of and facilitate teamwork and cooperation.