Natural Reinforcer Activity: Count Out Items from a Set by Building a Tower
I wanted to share a fun way that I practiced counting out items from a set with one of my students. But first, I’ll give a little bit of a background about natural reinforcers and why using them is such a powerful teaching strategy. When working with children on communication, language, and academics, I like to make learning activities as much fun as possible. To do this, I often use a child’s interests to teach and use natural reinforcers. A natural reinforcer is one that is
Practice Telling Time with "The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery"
This was one of my favorite books growing up. I spent hours finding the clues on each page and trying to solve the mystery of who stole the feast at Horace the Elephant's eleventh birthday party. The book is clever, fun, engaging, and the illustrations are beautiful. There's also a clock on each page, so you can have your child or students practice telling the time on each clock for a review if they've already learned this. Honestly, it's a very small part of the story, so it
Using Special Interests to Teach Alphabetical Order
If you've been following this page for a while, you probably know that one of my favorite teaching strategies is to incorporate my students' interests into whatever I'm teaching. It makes learning more fun for the students and they're often more engaged in the learning process. I was working on alphabetical order with one of my students recently, which is an easy skill to teach using a student's interests. He's really interested in Star Wars right now, so I've been having him
Scratch Coding Cards: Practice Coding in Simple Steps with Visual Supports
One of the things I teach to my science tutoring students most often is coding and computer programming. There are so many fun programs and activities available now for teaching these skills to kids and many of my students with autism love them and do a great job with them. Many of the programs are free as well. One of the free programs I use is called "Scratch." I use this one with students after they've done some coding basics (such as course A or B on code.org). Scratch is
Using Foam Craft Kits to Work on Language
One of my students loves ocean animals, so I try to use that interest to choose activities that are fun for him and give us opportunities to work on language/communication and academics. If you have a child or student who would enjoy making a project like this (and you can find these foam craft kits with all kinds of themes!), here are some ways you can work on language with them. (Note: links to some other craft kits are at the end of this post). What you'll want to do is ha
