March 27th Post - Autism

The guest speaker that we had come in on Thursday really gave me some insight onto how to deal with behavioral students like autism students. I had a little boy in my preschool class a couple years ago that had autism. When he first started it was pretty rough, I have never had to deal with something like that in my life. But then he started seeing therapists and really started to improve. Transitions became much easier for him and he started to become a part of our classroom family. One day he shocked us all...during group time we teach the children about shapes, colors, the alphabet, numbers, animals, etc. He would never sit with us during this time and would insist on playing with toys off by himself. We on this particular day we were going over the shapes. We would point to each one and say, “what is it?” The class would respond, “square” or whatever shape it was. We continued doing this on a poster board with all the shapes. Later that day this little boy with autism was sitting in front of the shapes poster pointing to each shape and saying, “What is it? Square. What is it? Circle.” He went through the whole poster like this and got every single one of them correct, it was amazing, he really was listening even though we didn't think he was!

I don't think that we have any students in my class right now that have autism. We have a lot of behavioral issues in the class. And although my CT attempts to address these in a affective way, she has a hard time with being consistent and focusing only on the “bad kids.” For example, in her class the students have a hard time with blurting out a lot. Although the whole class has this problem, some more than others, she seems to focus her negative feedback only on two boys in the class. I realized this was a problem when I did my reflection for the LA lesson plan and I started counting how many times each student blurted out during the lesson, it was shocking!