Michelle tours her autism classroom math center, which rotates through six stations with 1-4 students per group. She uses the Autism Helper Level Daily Curriculum and shows student growth from 37% to 73% in 20 days, plus shares how she makes worksheets reusable with lamination and Velcro.
Hi Autism Helper community, it's Michelle here with the website and blog, and I'm here to show you an extension on my classroom tour. This is my math center. This is a teacher-led center, and this is where we do our math instruction every day. In my classroom, I have 6 centers, and my students rotate through those centers every day. 2 of my centers are teacher-led, and the other 4 centers are independent centers. I utilize one of my paraprofessionals as a floater that floats between all of my independent centers, and then another paraprofessional runs my English language arts center. During my centers, I have 1 to 4 students at each center, and I group my centers based on behaviors, academic level, and cognitive level as well. One of my favorite items to use through my centers is the Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks from The Autism Helper. There's a workbook for each day of the week, and there are several different topics. So in my class, we're able to give some of our students at our center one of these to work with while we work closely with another student to focus on their IEP goals. And here's just what the Easy Matching Weekly Workbooks look like. Some of them are errorless tasks and others are simple matching tasks. These are both fun and engaging for my students. I also love the Autism Helper Level Daily Curriculum. In my classroom, we use Level 0.5 as well as Level 1, and some of my students are starting to use the new Level 1.5. But I wanted to show you how amazing these are. For starters, there's a page of work for each day of the school year, so I don't have to plan most of my curriculum within the classroom. Each set comes with a pre-test and a post-test so you can track your data and you have your data for your IEP meetings. Here you can see the student scored 37% at the beginning of the year and he grew all the way to 73%, um, after the first 20 days. This was just 20 days worth of practice and you can see the growth here. And then this is Level 0.5, so we focus more on tracing and pre-writing skills. And in Level 1, you're working more on writing numbers and counting as well as adding. The Autism Helper Level Daily curriculum works best when paired with supplemental activities. And what I really love about this curriculum is that once you score your post— your pre-test, it tells you what the students still need to practice on, and it gives you ideas for supplemental activities. And here are some of the supplemental activities that I use in my classroom. I have these simple worksheets from Made for Me Literacy and Made for Me Math. These are worksheets that we turned into work tasks. You can make any worksheet into an interactive work task using Velcro and lamination. Here I have some counting activities to focus on one-to-one correspondence. This activity is from Teaching Special Thinkers, and this fun pop-it activity is from Crafty in Kinder. I love incorporating tactile activities into my math instruction, and this is TouchMath. If you haven't heard of it, it's an amazing tool to use to teach addition and subtraction to our learners, and these are just fun 3D numbers and then tactile counter cards. Also, I have some especially education math TouchMath curriculum here. This is to teach the students how to count the dots, and I create packets for each of my learners that are learning addition. And I also, we have the addition pages back here. This is another one of the worksheets that's in this packet, and I just made it into a work task again using Velcro and lamination. Here's another example of a subtraction activity you can use from Made for Me Math. This is their subtraction strategies activity book. Again, I made it into a reusable work task just using Velcro and lamination and Astrobytes paper. And some days we have to use iPads to supplement our instruction in the classroom, and that's okay. I'm short-staffed in here. Some days are, you know, just a little crazier than others, so we put iPads at this table. And a couple of apps that I love for math instruction are the TouchMath app, which is like an actual game with an adventure mode. The kids love it. And we also use the Number Blocks app, and the kids love that as well. So that is the math curriculum that I use at my math center. I'm going to go ahead and link the Easy Matching weekly workbooks as well as the Level Daily curriculum in the comments. And if you have questions or comments, please go ahead and leave a comment, and I will get back to you. Also, don't be afraid to check us out on the blog or the website at theautismhelper.com. Until next time!
