In this instructional video, Michelle, a primary self‑contained special education teacher and founder of The Autism Helper, walks viewers through a ready‑made Autism Acceptance Unit designed for school‑wide use during Autism Acceptance Month. She explains why the unit should be taught across the whole school, especially to general education teachers who may feel uncertain about autism. The unit includes age‑appropriate lesson recommendations, book suggestions, three levels of autism fact sheets (for kindergarten through high school), visual supports, friendship and sensory awareness sheets, KWL charts, discussion prompts, infinity‑symbol art activities, true/false assessment boards, and digital options such as Google Slides, Google Forms, and Kahoot quizzes. Michelle highlights a YouTube video (“Amazing Things Happen”) as a visual learning tool and describes how to print, laminate, and display the true/false boards around the school. She emphasizes collaboration between special and general educators, the ease of implementation (print‑and‑go), and directs viewers to The Autism Helper website, YouTube channel, and blog for further resources.
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Are you stuck on how to approach Autism Acceptance Month at your school? Let me help you. I'm Michelle with The Autism Helper. I'm a primary self-contained special education teacher, and this is my classroom. Today I'm going to show you some of the things that I use at my school to promote inclusion and acceptance of our autistic students. Let's go! When thinking about autism acceptance and how to start teaching it, the best place to start is within your own community, and if you're like me, you work at a school with a ton of general education students and a lot of general education teachers who are unsure about autism. So that's where I use the Autism Acceptance Unit, and I really, I share this with my teachers and we work together as a team to teach autism acceptance to our students. When teaching autism acceptance, it's super important to do this school-wide. Now, the Autism Helper makes it super easy for you by by offering this Autism Acceptance Unit. This Autism Acceptance Unit has age-appropriate information and guidance for students at different grade levels. Now, as a special educator myself, I understand autism and I can totally teach the school-wide activities on autism acceptance, but I'm asking the general education teachers to teach this Autism Acceptance Unit. So, it's going to be a little bit more difficult, but what I love about the unit is that the Autism Helper has made it very easy for our gen ed teachers to teach to their students. The gen ed teachers are given lesson recommendations, book suggestions, autism fact sheets, friendship and sensory awareness sheets, as well as art activities and some more discussion questions and true/false questions for their classrooms. So let's take a look inside the unit so you can see what you get.
What I love about this unit is that everything is already done for me. I just have to print, prep, and go. So here is the COVID sheet, and then here is everything that is included within the Autism Acceptance Unit. It's amazing. Let's look inside. Typically, as a special education teacher, I'm very familiar with autism, and my students are all autistic, so it's very easy for me to accept and understand their disability as well as how I need to help them. But our general education teachers might feel a little apprehensive or scared that they might teach their students the wrong things. So here is an amazing introduction, some lesson recommendations, and some great information on how to teach this unit to our general education students. Here are some lovely book recommendations that are included with the unit, and what I love about this is I can send this list to my principal with some links, or even to my librarian with some links, and that way we can get a few copies so that teachers are able to check this out through the library. Next up, we have amazing age-appropriate and guidance for students at different grade levels with the Autism Acceptance Unit. So here are our facts about autism in a level 1, a level 2, and a level 3, and this can be used for kindergarten all the way up to high school. As teachers, we know that it's incredibly important to provide visual supports for all students, so these two fact sheets are very great for our general education students to learn how to be a good friend to an autistic person, as well as learn about sensory facts that not everybody would be aware of.
To continue fostering the need for visual learning with students, I love to play this video called "Amazing Things Happen" by the Amazing Things Project on YouTube. This video goes into detail about what autism is, but it also talks about how we can help autistic people by including them and being patient with them.
Autism acceptance is all about learning and growing our knowledge of autism so that we can understand how to accept it and how to help our peers that are autistic. So what I love about this unit is it really goes into the teaching aspect of it. So we start with an autism acceptance KWL chart, then we have some questions for students to answer or ask questions as well. So here are— write one or two questions that you have about autism, or what are some things that you can do to be helpful. And this is also differentiated, so this would be for a lower level grade, a primary grade, and this would be for an upper level grade. Another level of support that we can show our autistic peers is we can do an infinity symbol art activity to understand the importance of the infinity symbol with the autistic community. Now for our upper grade, like late elementary, middle school, and high school, it can be very helpful to have whole group or small group discussions surrounding autism and autism acceptance, but we don't always have those questions ready. So what I love about this unit is that these discussion prompts are ready for us. You get 20 discussion prompts You can easily put these into a Google Slide, make it digital, or you can have students complete it through a Google Form. Here's a great way for students to test their knowledge of autism. So these are the true/false boards. You get several of these boards. You can print them out, laminate them, and use some Velcro, and then place these around the school so that when students walk by, they can easily just move the answer forward and test their understanding. And then you can see as a school how students' understanding of autism is coming along. With these, you can also create a digital Google Slide or even a Kahoot quiz. You might also want to do a Google Form with these questions just to test your students' understanding. But there are so many options with this unit. It is truly amazing. I highly recommend getting this unit to teach autism acceptance to your school.
For more information about autism acceptance, as well as resources to help you help people with autism, like and subscribe to The Autism Helper on YouTube and check out our blog at theautismhelper.com.
