Grace from The Autism Helper tours a K-1 self-contained autism classroom. The lights stay off to reduce sensory overload, blue wall dividers create focused work zones, and ceiling-mounted swings help students self-regulate. The daily routine mirrors typical classrooms, but the space is designed around sensory and communication needs.
Hey y'all, it's Grace here with The Autism Helper, and in honor of Autism Acceptance Month being in April, I wanted to share with you all what my kindergarten self-contained autism classroom looks like. This would be great to share with your students if you are a gen ed teacher as to what an autism classroom might look like, and to think of things as you're watching the video that are not only different but also the same. So anyways, happy Autism Acceptance month, and let's go take a look at my classroom.
Welcome to our K-1 autism classroom. Is a quick little overview of our entire room and what it looks like. And when you are first seeing our room, you might notice some things that are different in our room than in your classroom, one being that we do not have our lights on. Students with autism sometimes experience the world more intensely than you and I do, and lighting can be very overwhelming for some of our friends. So by keeping our lights off, it helps our students to not feel overwhelmed and keep their bodies calm as well as ready to learn for the day. Throughout our classroom, you will see that we have a lot of visuals and different ways to communicate, and this helps our students to understand and communicate better with us because not all of our students can communicate with their words. They help them to navigate the classroom room and also advocate for themself and their needs. You might also be wondering what these little blue walls are that you see throughout our room, and these blue walls are what we call dividers. Our dividers help us to break up our room into smaller designated areas for our students so that they are able to focus and learn in a way that works best for their brains. This chain that you see hanging from our ceiling is actually how we attach different sensory swings. And for our students, sensory swings provide movement, and this movement helps our students to regulate their bodies, which means helping their bodies to feel calm, focused, safe, and ready to learn. So now that I've shared some things that might look different in our classroom, I also want to talk about some things that might be the same or very similar in our classroom as it is yours.
Every morning we start our day with a morning circle. We also do whole group activities at our horseshoe table, and after students are finished with breakfast, they do their morning worksheet.
Thanks for learning more about our students, and remember, we're more alike than we are different. We just need different supports to shine.
