Jen, an autism teacher, shares a classroom system for teaching WH questions using color-coded bins, anchor charts, and adaptive materials. She recommends starting with concrete questions like who and where before moving to why, and shows how to pair visual supports with AAC devices for expressive responses.
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Raise your hand if you are an autism teacher and you have a student with a WH question goal. Me too. I'm going to show you how I target WH question goals. My name is Jen and I am a K-12 self-contained autism teacher, and no matter the school year, I always seem to have a student with a WH question goal, and for good reason. We live and breathe finding answers through questions, and our students need to be able to ask questions and answer questions, but it's really important that they're able to discern that wh- piece. So I'm going to share with you how I do that right now. All right, if we are just starting with wh- questions, here's a tip: start with something simple. Don't start with things like why. Start with things like who or where. Those are much more specific and make the task receptive. Expressive adds a whole other layer. So make the task receptive so students can tell you easily, and then make it very specific and easier to target, such as where and who. These are some of the anchor charts that I use, and I love this because it tells the student the meaning of the wh- So here, why— what does that do? It tells a reason or a person. Here, when— tells a date, a time, a season, or a situation. And then it gives visuals to help support that as well. I use these anchor charts in my instruction all the time. I not only reference them, but I want my students to be able to reference them while they're showing and working towards mastery. It's really important to have something there for students to be able to rely on. We use environmental things to help us figure out things and situations all the time. Having an anchor chart allows students a reference point, and it's really important to teach that. The other thing that I really like about anchor charts is that they're easy to fade. You don't have to fade them right away, but you can fade them very, um, effectively if you need to. I pulled out all of my organizers so I can show you how I do this, but each of these bins holds materials for a specific WH question. So this is going to be the bin for where, This is going to be the bin for "why." Let's open up this "where" bin so I can show you here. Okay, let's dig in. This is the "where" set, and there are adaptive books, and I love this because these are real pictures. "I see these items, where am I?" This is the kitchen. We've got multiple choices down here. "I see these items, where am I?" I had a student actually working on this today, which is why it's all filled out. "I see these items, where am I?" You can see these are real life pictures and I love that. Also, we have Where Do You Go? You can see this is all color-coded. This where is actually like a purple color in real life and over here the why is like a brown, who is red, what is blue. It just really makes it easy to organize, which I really, really appreciate. But where do you go questions, I love this. Where do you go to get your car repaired? Where do you go to get your hair styled? Great questions. Another adaptive book, a "where" question book. So this is positional. Where's the cat? Where's the truck? And I love the symbols that it uses. So these are great. I love good adaptive books. But these task cards are also pretty fantastic. There are two different sets. One is a real photo set and one is not real photo. They're clip art, and these are just so smart. Where do you play baseball? Where do pigs live? Where do deer live? And then over here, more where task cards that are different. So where do you cook food? Where do you keep dishes? Where do you keep your tools? These are great because there are so many in each set that you really get a good feel for whether or not the child has mastered the material. There's another task set, and these are work tasks, and outside of the task cards, I love a good work task. What I love about this is these are where, and so students are going to take these 4 locations: kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and family room, and they are going to split the items in there and then put them in the corresponding basket or bag, whatever you've got going on. This is a great one, um, and I love that. And there are several— I mean, look at this, there's 21 pages of work tasks that are also included. Like here, oh, looks so good. Do you put it in the cabinet or do you put it in the fridge? Where does it go? And look at all these food items. I love a good work task. Those are fantastic. I don't have them prepped yet, and let me tell you a secret, I actually don't prep them for my whole classroom. I actually just print out the worksheet and I have the students separate it and I use it that way. For me, it's less cutting, laminating, all the things, and sometimes you just can't prep everything. So I just print them out and I use them that way. Let me show you on the Life Skills Task Cards what I'm talking about. These are the Where Life Skills Task Cards, and I love these because they are such real-life scenarios. You need to go get cash, where should you go? Um, so how about this one? Austin needs to get a collar and a leash for his puppy, where should he go? And there's choices. So I love to just print these in black and white and use the set as necessary for the student. This is going to be a little, for my students anyway, this task is going to be harder. So I'm going to pull it only for the students who need it, and I may need to modify this task. Again, I'm K-1, 2. Not all of my students know where to go get their teeth cleaned because, well, half of them probably haven't been to the dentist before. Um, but where can you go to get something to eat for lunch? That's a great one. You know, they could go to the kitchen, they could go to a restaurant, they could go lots of places here, so I would support this with AAC use as well. It's really simple to do. I would just say, "Where do you go to eat?" Yeah, "Where do you go to get something to eat?" If students needed help, I could prompt them by pointing to places, or if they needed additional help, I would pull out my AAC that mirrors their AAC, put it side by side, and and then hit places and then be able to choose from there. The beauty of this is that you can buy just one WH question. So if you're just targeting where, you can buy where. If you're just targeting who, you can buy who. If you want the whole set, you can buy the whole set. There is a mixed WH question section too, um, and a WH question unit. I have not used that yet. My learners are not quite high enough for that, but I look forward to the day that I have somebody who can use that because that looks really cool. I'm excited to see how they can discern between those wh-questions when they hear them and when they read them. This unit took a little bit of time to get set up, printed, cut, laminated, but it is one of those things that I constantly reach for. I am using it over and over and over again in my classroom, and I don't ever foresee a time when I'm teaching when my students aren't going to be working on wh-questions. It's just one of those things that's a necessity in life, is to be able to work within wh-questions. So I'm happy to have the resources at my fingertips. I'm so curious what you use to help support your learners in learning wh-questions. If you've got a great resource or if you know a great strategy, definitely let us know down below.
