weeks 7 and 8 reflections

Week 7
During this week I tried to go over expectations with the students before the activity began. I also started a class sticker page for the kids to earn extra recess. I made sure to choose a goal for the first week that I knew they could meet. They did and they were so proud of themselves. The students can still earn stickers for behavior beyond the class behavior. The behavior during whole class activities seems to be improving. My CT and I also set up a personal space for the child with autism, E, last week. He used it a few times during the week and his emotional state was improved when he chose to rejoin the class. The previous method of talking with E in the hallway did not always work. First of all, it was very time consuming, and even when E said he was ready to come back into the room, many times he would get upset right away. When he returned from his space, it was on his terms and he stayed in the group longer, much longer, without getting upset again. When E got upset and my CT or I asked him what he wanted to do, he told us that he wanted to go to his space. I am documenting the times that E uses his space to see if there is a pattern in when he gets upset. I hope this is as successful when we move classrooms. My goals for the next week are to continue to encourage the students to work together for whole class rewards and to encourage E to continue monitoring his own needs.

Week 8
This was our first week in our new classroom. It has been slightly chaotic. Since my CT is moving back to the old classroom after Christmas, we didn't move everything to the new classroom. Also since she moved over a weekend, there was not a lot of time to get organized. I think she did a fantastic job. But there are still times when one of us is looking for something and we're not sure where it is. The students have handled the move fairly well. They seem to be flexible when we have to change small procedural things because of the new setup. E did not use his space at all. In fact, we saw some different manifestations of his behaviors this week. Luckily he hasn't started hitting his head again or screaming, but his behavior is certainly not going in the same direction it was last week. I didn't take time to show him where his space was before he got upset, so I need to do that this coming week. When he was upset I told him that he had his space in this room and he could go to it, but he didn't want to. The class behavior continued to improve this week. The students earned twice as many stickers and where very proud of themselves. We went to the professional building next to the hospital on Friday to go trick-or-treating and their behavior was wonderful. They followed directions promptly, waited their turn patiently, and were extremely polite to the professionals handing out candy. I handed out stickers quite often during the trip to encourage the behavior to continue and I used a lot of verbal praise. Before we left I wrote out 5 expectations for the trip, went over them, and told the students that they could earn 2 more minutes of extra recess (a total of 7) if they earned their last class sticker on this trip and that I would be handing out stickers when I saw the students following the 5 things I had written down. I think this helped a lot. The students saw and heard what was expected of them and they knew that there would be immediate reinforcement and reinforcement later. During a two hour trip most of the students earned 6 stickers. I made sure to tell them that they earned the stickers because of their behavior. I had been dreading this trip but we had a blast.


Misc.
There are new pictures posted on flickr. Hopefully I will post about the wedding and my trip to South Padre soon. I'm tired and am ready for this semester to be over. I still want to immerse myself in reading.