A teacher shows how her autism classroom uses visual supports and physical zones to help students understand expectations and manage behavior. The computer station has picture cards for rules and help requests, while a separate break area with labeled bins teaches independent cleanup and organization skills.
This is my desk area. I open it up to my aides. I never am sitting at my desk, but it's pretty much where we store all of our materials, laminator, um, Velcro, all those important things. Over here are our computers and our word wall, which we haven't started filling in yet. A lot of the computer visuals that I made kind of try to tie in the rules but also as a visual to use with students, so One of the computer rules is we're not putting things in our mouth, but it also comes off. So for students that have lower receptive language, instead of coming over here and yelling at them to get the headphones out of their mouth, you can come over and grab the visual and show it to them. So it's all right here ready to go. Also visuals for the students to request help. So instead of a student that maybe has some aggressive, aggressive behaviors, banging their head or biting their hands, if they need help they can grab this visual off and come hand it to a teacher. Teacher. So the only way the student knows how to communicate is with inappropriate behaviors. They're going to keep doing that until you give them another way. So having these visuals where they need them is so important. So that's our computer station. Um, the kind of other station in our room— and again, very physically divided. This divider I got is at the branch, which is awesome. Using shelves to divide. Again, this is our break area, sensory area. I'm not a huge sensory person, but I know I personally think that sensory can be built into the day and can be generalized to look normal. I know kids with autism need those sensory breaks. Um, I just would prefer to call it break time and not sensory time, just because I think it's a little more typical. But that's my own thing. So in here we have, you know, age-appropriate material. My kids are 10 to 14. They cannot sit on little baby chairs. We have futon, big chairs. Um, I don't like beanbag chairs with teenagers because I think that invites roaming hands, so we don't do beanbags. We have our therapy balls over here. We have all of our toys that are all labeled. I really like labeling each thing because kids need to learn how to put things away the right way. So plastic toys go here, sensory items go here, books, balls, dinosaurs— everything has a spot and everyone knows. So even some of my lower functioning students can clean up by themselves and clean up by— in the right way. This is an easy sorting task that is a natural skill that you need to do. So these are all our toys over here.
