Michelle, an autism support teacher, shows how to make durable visual supports and adapted books for special ed classrooms. She uses a GBC laminator with 5 mil thickness, hard Velcro dots applied before cutting, and a coil binder to assemble finished books that withstand heavy classroom use.
Let's talk about making our visuals and our adapted books in our self-contained classrooms last. I'm Michelle with The Autism Helper. I'm a primary self-contained autism support teacher, and this is my classroom. I've been working as a self-contained teacher for about 8 years, and I have found some amazing tools and resources that help my visuals and my adapted books last in my classroom. Let's take a look. First things first, let's talk about setting up a designated teacher area where you can keep your prep materials away from the students so that students don't have access to these. In my classroom, I'm lucky enough to have a separate room, and I keep all of my prep materials such as my laminator, my paper cutter, and my Velcro dots in here. Let's take a look. So my room is a little bit of a mess, but that's all right. We use it for prep. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be functional. In these drawers, this is where I keep my prep materials such as my lamination and my Velcro dots. Extra paper. This one has all of my Colorbrights paper that I use, my Astro Brights, and I use a lot of that for color coding in my classroom. As a special educator, we know how many laminators we go through. We go through a ton of laminators. This one here is the GBC, also known as Swingline, Fusion 3100L. This was first introduced to me through Sasha on the Autism Helper, and I absolutely love this laminator. As you can see, it goes all the way from letter size, even menu size. It can do photos. It's a wonderful laminator. Not only does it do 3 mil, 5 mil, and 7 mil, but it also reverses automatically and will turn off automatically if it jams. Today I'm going to be making a social skills adapted book from the social skills curriculum on theautismhelper.com, and I love this curriculum because it comes with all these amazing adapted books. I print my pages double-sided so that I can save on lamination as well as paper. And then for my class, because I have the primary level students, I use the thicker 5mm lamination and it just lasts a lot longer with my classroom and my demographic of students. This adapted book is pretty much ready to laminate. I love that I don't have to trim or do any cutting. I can just put it in the lamination sheet and then stick it in the laminator. The team over at The Autism Helper has done an amazing job with this curriculum, and they've given us the numbers for each of the icons, and the book itself has all of the page numbers as well. So what I like to do before I laminate this is I like to write down in the corner the number of the page that the icon belongs to. Okay, so now that I've written the numbers on each of the icons, I'm going ahead— going to go ahead and go against the grain of sped prep, and I'm going to cut these out before I laminate them just because the students that I work with are a little bit younger and more impacted, so things go in their mouth, and our icons tend to last longer when we cut and then laminate. The trick to cutting before laminating is leaving a lot of space in between your icons so that when you cut out your icons, you can leave a space of lamination around the card. Okay, so I have my icons laminated, and here's an important time-saving step. I like to add my Velcro dots before I cut out my icons, and that way I'm not having to add them after I cut. Now, in my classroom, we put the hard Velcro on the card. Now, it doesn't matter what system you use. If you want to use the soft Velcro on the cards or the hard Velcro on the cards, whatever you decide to do with your classroom, keep it the same so that your icons are interchangeable between activities if you need them to be. Alright, so I have started cutting out my icons, and as you can see, I've left a good amount of lamination around the photo, and I've also trimmed the edges because these edges do get sharp for our little fingers. So now I'm going to go through the book and I'm going to add my soft Velcro pieces for my icons to stick to, and each page will get 3 pieces of soft Velcro. Now that our pages are laminated and Velcro has been added, I'm going to take this a next step and I'm going to bind this book to make it an actual book. So this is my coil book binder, and all you have to do to coil or to bind the books is stick the page in right here, and then I'm going to pull down, and our book is ready for binding. So I'm going to do this for all of my pages. Now that all my pages have been bound, I'm going to add a coil ring to the book. Now that the coils have been added to the book, the book is ready to be used with students. I touched my friend's hair. It made her upset. How can I be a good friend? Walk away or say, "I'm sorry." Oh yeah, that's being a really good friend. My friend got new glasses. I think they look great. How can I be a good friend? Give a compliment, like, "I like your glasses," or touch his glasses. That's right! For more tips and resources to help you help people with autism, like and subscribe to The Autism Helper on YouTube, and check out our blog and resources at theautismhelper.com.
