Sasha from theautismhelper.com shows 48 laminated conversation starter cards for special education classrooms. Each card has one topic and five questions that get progressively harder, helping students with autism stay focused, ask follow-up questions, and practice social skills during morning routines and downtime.
Hi, this is Sasha from theautismhelper.com, and this is a product preview of my "Let's Talk About" conversation starters for special ed. So one of the main focuses in my classroom is improving communication and social skills. That's something children with autism really struggle with, and actually students, a lot of students struggle with this. Students with special needs, students in the gen ed, something that sometimes we need to work on in a structured way. So I love these cards as part of our daily routine to kind of elicit different types of questions and get conversations going. To teach students to stay on topic and talk about the same thing for more than just 1 or 2 questions. Something I really see with a lot of students is they're able to respond to 1 or 2 questions and then don't have much more to add to the conversation, or they want to change the topic to what they'd like to talk about. So this is to kind of pursue the same topic on multiple questions and kind of go beyond just the "Do you like this?" or "What is this?" Kind of have higher-level thinking about different topics. So as I'm going through here, I'm just kind of showing you there's 48 different cards. So I laminate these and cut them out, and we keep them in our morning area. And each topic has 5 different related questions. So for example, this one says, let's talk about friendship. Who are your friends? How can you be a good friend? What happens when you fight with a friend? Why are friends important? Where did you meet your friends? So it kind of takes some of those higher-level thinking skills and incorporates them into the question. Um, so these are great to provide your students with questions already that they don't have to think of it. They can use these as mini scripts when they're talking to their peers. They can take out one of these and you could practice asking these questions to each other. You can start by showing them you first asking them and then them picking a follow-up question to ask you. So it just kind of does give different options of things to talk about while also giving that visual cue. Sometimes when you first ask a question, I think our kids are overwhelmed trying to focus on what is the topic and what are you asking. So even kind of prefacing this all with like, "Okay, we're talking about card games." They're already getting their mind in the right direction that they're already there versus if you just said, "What's your favorite card game?" It's sometimes overwhelming. They have to think about, "Oh, she said card game, or she said favorite. I have to pick one." So that kind of prefacing it all with like, "Okay, this is what we're talking about," can be really helpful for our students. So these are great things for downtime, for guided direct instruction on communication skills. Things like that. So again, this is a product preview of my Conversation Starters for Special Education by theautismhelper.com.
