My A-Z Challenge will try to link up special needs blogs that
deal with the needs I have encountered in my mainstream primary school as well
as direct to TpT resources available free to others – when you have no real
budget these resources are invaluable.
We all need to help each other so please feel free to leave feedback and
your own links to websites and free resources you use.
Autism
The autistic spectrum covers such a wide range and some of
the children in my school obviously have autistic tendencies (this might mean
they have very literal tendencies or slightly obsessive behaviours) but we have
no severely autistic children.
Learning to be part of a mainstream classroom can be
difficult for our autistic children but once they have common routines and
behaviour management systems in place all have settled in well. Talking through changes and giving children
the time to discuss why things happen is very important. Seeing problems or misunderstandings from
their viewpoint is also a valuable aid to being able to minimise the potential
for this to happen again in the future.
Allowing autistic children to use their strong interests wherever
possible in their classroom writing and mathematics also pays dividends. A child I taught at age 5 was obsessed with
pipes and tunnels and what lay under the ground – finding books on this subject
quickly led to his interest in furthering his reading ability in order to
access them and also developed his ability to stand in front of his entire
class to give a book sharing about the Channel Tunnel!
Sasha Hallagan is a specialist autism teacher who blogs and
runs a website The Autism Helper http://theautismhelper.com She also
has a TpT store where she provides freebies as well as a large range of
products so please check her out – she is amazing!
ADHD
After attending a conference last year on ADHD and meeting
educational psychologists, parents, teachers, doctors and other healthcare
workers I came away inspired by a lecture based on the ideas in the Nurtured
Heart workbook which we were all given a copy of. I think there are lots of new ideas and
approaches to be used by parents and teachers to help young children cope with
their condition and change our own perceptions of it. The website http://difficultchild.com/ shares videos about the techniques and allows
access to resources.
Chris De Feyter at TpT has some useful resources on ADHD
which I have also found useful to share with teachers and parents.
TpT Resource A is for Alphabet
Finally – check out my Alphabet lowercase to uppercase match
freebie – where children need to match the little birds to their correct nest.
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