Michelle, an autism educator with 20 years of experience, walks through her first-week classroom setup. Skip academics. Instead, run center rotations to teach transitions, watch students closely to learn what they need, use colored visual schedules, and build a calm-down corner with movement breaks and sensory tools.
Hi friends, I'm Michelle, and I've spent the last 20 years as an educator helping hundreds of autistic children and their families. Over that time, I've learned that the first few weeks in an autism classroom are such a unique and special time. Instead of diving straight into academics, I like to focus on building routines, creating comfort, and forming connections with my students. Today, I'm going to walk you through exactly what I do in those first few days and weeks to set my classroom and my students up for success. One of the very first things I introduce are my center rotations. Now these aren't academic centers yet. We will get there, but for at least 2 weeks, my centers are all about exploration and building the skill of moving between activities. At my centers, I'll set up different activities such as Play-Doh, Legos, iPads, and books, and students rotate every 10 to 15 minutes so they get used to transitions and learn what to expect. I call this time all hands on deck. That's where myself and my paraprofessionals are up walking the classroom, helping redirect the students and help keep them in the centers. While the students are playing, myself and my paraprofessionals are watching closely to see what captures the students' attention, what skills they already have, and where they might need the most support. Good job! Wow, good taking turns! I love it! The backbone of our classroom is routine. From day one, I teach our schedule. Every student has an individual colored schedule, and we model how to check it before and after each activity. We also make sure the students learn the flow of our day, from arrival, morning meeting, centers, snack, and so on. This is not learned in one day. It's repetition, repetition, repetition. Every time we transition, we practice using our schedule together. "Michelle, I write my business." "Michael wrote business." The first weeks are also when I introduce our expectations, our rules, and social stories. These are short personalized stories or rules that explain our routines, our expectations, or new situations in a way that students can easily understand. So here I have our expectation that we use quiet mouth, and then I pair it with a video on what a quiet mouth looks like. During these weeks, I'm also learning as much as I can about my students. I do some informal preference assessments, which basically I watch and note what toys or activities or snacks the students gravitate towards. I also send home a start of the year questionnaire, and this is for families to fill out so I can learn about their child's strengths, needs, interests, and even their home life. And I work hard to start building that homeschool connection, whether that's through communication notebooks, quick check-in emails, or sending home photos of their child's day. Another huge focus for me in the first weeks is teaching self-regulation. In my class, we take a lot of movement breaks, dancing, stretching, using flexible seating, or using our sensory tools. The goal is to help understand students what strategies are available when they need to calm down or refocus. These breaks aren't extra, they're actually essential for learning. And over here you can see my calm down corner that students are allowed to go to when they are feeling overwhelmed. So those first few weeks in my autism classroom, they're not about rushing into academics. They're actually about play, structure, connection, and regulation. When we invest in these things early, the rest of the year runs so much smoother. Now, just to show you how beneficial it is to take the time, work through the routine and the structure of your classroom, I want you to check out more of my videos to see how my students are actually learning in my classroom.
