Blog 5 Classroom Management

Oh goodie the end of the year!!! Well, actually not so goodie...more like let's keep it together for the last 27 days of school!  Keeping the kids on track and learning for the last month of school is becoming a lesson in itself.  I use a visual communication with my students with dots.  They have three dots to keep and or earn before the end of the day.  If they are all gone at the end of the day, I call parents and we discuss behavior, what was or was not accomplished.  My hope is that they will reinforce listening, working and keep communication open.  We review zones of regulation all the time to make sure that the kids can retrieve at all times.  They have done well this year with staying in zones and self soothing when they get into the red zone.

I work with parents almost on a weekly basis and have as much of the year as I can to keep an open communication.  It seems as we are getting ready for a large shift in our program, it is almost daily but the reality to me is, if that is what it takes to make sure that my students are taken care of, my parents are in the know and we make this transition as easily as it can be done, then that is what has to happen.

Communication no matter what is key...whether it is the parent, teachers, administration, district, specialists...but the most important is the student!!!!

Active engagement in the classroom good or no?

Oh how I love using show me!!! I have been using show me techniques since day one and knowing that's what it was...I was going more for engagement with my kids! :-)  I use thumps up and thumps down/hand signals as well as using writing techniques on their desks with simple answers since they hall have write on desks and we can work on OT, writing words, spelling all at once! 
The hardest one for me and I constantly am having to remind myself is to wait...so they can process the question and create an answer.  I have gone to actually breathing and taking a drink of water to give them time.  It seems to help. 

We also use perform a great deal during speech and social skills.  We do a lot of acting out social situations so that they can see and actually partake in the situation and understand better what is right and what is wrong so that they will hopefully recall when they are in that situation later on!

A great deal of impromptu occurs in room 119 and I believe it is some of the healthiest, best times we have and it helps develop these kids into better students and friends as they continuously will bring something up later that was reviewed or stated in these impromptu engagements that hit home to them..it's refreshing and re instills to me that we are doing the right thing in the moment!  I love to engage my students and try every effort to do so on a daily basis!

Stem in a self contained classroom.....YES YES YES!!

I am a huge believer of our kiddos experiencing what the general education classrooms experience on a daily basis and that includes using STEM as much as I can.  It isn't always perfect and it is not as intense but I do use it in my classroom and my students love it.  We adapt the design process to meet our students needs but other than that, we head full steam ahead!  We have done projects with valentines day heart and different liquids to see what would happen to the hearts: dissolve, stay hard or just get mushy.  The students loved to predict and we used pictures that they drew and then graphed which worked best.  Mushy won!

I believe through a bit of adaptation and differentiation all students can use and enjoy STEM no matter what their level, need, or condition.  They deserve the experience and the ability to see it in action!