Michelle from The Autism Helper demonstrates a daily whole-group instruction model for autism classrooms. The routine uses a 25-30 minute morning block with Google Slides, a name randomizer, and Starfall to cover rules, attendance, and calendar skills, followed by a 15-20 minute afternoon segment on letters, numbers, and core words. Real-world tasks like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich anchor social studies and science lessons.
Chapters
Special education teachers often struggle with whole group instruction in their classroom. Our learners are working at so many different levels, which makes it difficult to engage each of our students. And if our students aren't engaged, that's when the problem behaviors occur. However, whole group instruction incorporates so many different life skills that would benefit our learners throughout their lives. So it's important to incorporate a little bit of whole group instruction within our day. I'm Michelle with The Autism Helper, and today I'm going to show you my tried and true whole group instruction that I structure every day to decrease problem behaviors and increase student engagement. Every day in my classroom begins with whole group instruction, and my first initial whole group instruction lasts between 25 to 30 minutes every morning. I project onto my whiteboard using this computer here, and Google Slides that I have created, and I edit these basically every morning. I also have a box of fidgets right up here for students to have access to. My paraprofessionals will grab these as students need, and my students all sit in chairs surrounding our carpet area. The first thing we do at every whole group is review our classroom rules. And I do have a student come up and go over the rules with all of the class. And then we look at our slides and we listen to a song. What I do here is I link the video directly to the photo so that all I have to do is click on the video and it will open up for us. When selecting a student to participate during our whole group instruction, I use this website called wheelofnames.com. This helps with student engagement. It gets them super excited, and we sing a little song as it's spinning. And then students aren't as disappointed when their name isn't chosen because it is a randomizer. After our following the rules, we listen to this very calming song. A lot of my students might come in from breakfast overstimulated, and this just gives us time to just cool down. It's a very calming song. The video again is just linked to the picture. All I have to do is click on the link and it opens up the video. Following our calming video, we do attendance and all of my students' pictures are here. However, I've covered them for privacy and we discuss who is here for the day and who is at home. I also do all of the staff in the classroom and then this is my attendance. I link that directly onto this slide so I'm never forgetting attendance again. After attendance is taken, we go over here to this slide and we do our calendar on Starfall.com. And again, it's linked directly to the slide, so everything just opens. After our calendar, we sequence last month, this month, and next month. This is very important, these vocabulary words to teach my students, so we focus on these every day. Then we watch a months of the year video, and after the video has completed, we put our months of the year in order. And this is where I go to my wheel of names, and I pick a student to come up and help me sequence the months of the year. This is done where a student goes up to the board, they use a pointer, and I help place the months of the year in order for them. After we do months of the year, we also do days of the week. We sequence these. I help the students with this. Some other very important vocabulary words are yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Then we do a days of the week video, and again, I pick a student to help me sequence the days of the week in order. Next up, we count how many days we have been in school. This, we do another random name, and our student that is chosen will come up and tell us how our outside temperature is, how our outside weather is, and then most importantly if we're going to have outdoor recess. And then we do a weather song. Once we're done with our weather song, I will review what our lunch choices for the day are. So we've completed our initial whole group instruction for the morning. We're going to break out into 4 small group centers Then we're going to do snack, bathroom, and recess. And after our recess, we will come back to whole group instruction and do about 15 to 20 minutes more of whole group instruction. This second block of whole group instruction includes our letter of the week. I show students real-life photos, and then I also link to Starfall, and we do the Starfall activity for the letter. Next, we— I pick a student and the student comes up to the board And using their finger or a finger pointer, they trace the letter of the week, both uppercase and lowercase. And then we do a number of the week. And my students are both focusing on number identification, but this is where the real differentiation comes in. So I have students that are working on identifying numbers, or I have students that are working on counting by fives, or even working on place value. So there's a little bit of something for each of my students. And I, again, I link a video here for my students to make that engaging for them. After our number of the week, we go into a core word of the week, and students will watch a video about the core word. And then we will go over to my easel, and students will practice writing the word on the easel. Once my students have completed their writing, then we review our core words. I just review, we don't watch the videos, and then we finish our centers before we go to lunch and recess. After lunch and recess, I give my students some quiet time and some leisure time before we dive into whole group instruction again. And once their leisure time is all done, then we do some whole group instruction. This is where I do a lot of my social studies or my science instruction during whole group. But you can see here we've been focusing on making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I play a video for the students and then I have some slides linked here and we go over all the steps to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Of course, you can see I use a lot of visuals. And then here my students will take turns using the Wheel of Names randomizer again. They will take turns sequencing the steps on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If I have some extra time after our science or social studies unit, we will do a Boom Card, and then we do 2 centers and go home. That's my structured whole group instruction in my classroom. If you're interested in seeing more videos of my classroom, like and subscribe to The Autism Helper on YouTube, and check out our website at theautismhelper.com.
