Independence is the goal for all our students in their daily routine. I’m going to share some tips and tricks that we use in our room to help promote independence!

Work Bins

• Students complete 3 bins with one activity in each of them
• ONLY MASTERED activities – these are activities that have been taught at the Teacher Table and have shown they can complete it on their own
• They are typically file folder activities, but can also be worksheets (if their fine motor is there)

✰ These allow them to build confidence in completing something on their own, as well as practice skills already learned and gives you time to work 1:1 with students!

Independent Activity Schedule

• A lot of our activities include building fine motor strength (i.e. bugs with tweezers and sorting containers) and life skill activities (i.e. buttons and snaps).
• From the one & only @supportingspeciallearners — she has a wonderful post about this!

✰ Great for building independence in these life skills!

Teach Time

• We are beginning with learning our hours and half hours to eventually be able to add times to our visual schedule.

✰ If you want your students to use the clock or they are listening for the bell, this is a great way to incorporate this life skill!

Visuals are a must

• Using Boardmaker (or similar program) – create visuals to help your students navigate your room
• Have individualized visual schedules – each of my students has their own specific schedule
• Sometimes just putting “Literacy” on their visual schedule isn’t enough – we break it into “Bins”, “Teacher Table” and “Work Time” and the class schedule says “Literacy”

✰ Pictures help show gestures so you don’t have to prompt!

Don’t assume, teach!

• I recommend using most to least prompting when beginning something new. For example, if they are learning to wash their hands, go in with a hand-over-hand prompt first for them to understand the task then fade it back.
• Don’t assume they know where things go, how things work or what to do with an activity that we think is “simple”. Show, explain and coach them through it!

✰ Success story this past month: A student transitioned to using a visual schedule with Choice built into it to break-up work and reinforce completion of activities! This learner is also beginning to work on more functional literacy and math…stay tuned for more!

Kate ♡