Primary ASD

Even though I have an in my room, I made this hallway display so that it can reach more students and adults. My classroom is right beside the office and the front entrance so there’s quite a bit of traffic always coming and going… I figured this display will give them an opportunity to practice positive affirmations while they simply read the display 🥰😝. It’s so important to foster and to our students (and ourselves), and in the form of statements is a really great way to do so!
This is just a closet door but it’s the only space available to display our work… if this were a real board and didn’t required to be opened and closed periodically, I would have put a small mirror there too :)

Yay! Here’s to my 9th teaching year…can’t believe I’m almost hitting the double digits!!

I’m now officially in back to school mode (can’t believe the summer is over already!). Thanks for continuing to follow along on my teaching journey… I promise to get back to posting regularly on here. Crazy to think that this was my VERY FIRST classroom ever!! I remember my mom and sister helped me clean out and organize this learning space for a whole week! I wish I took more pictures of my previous classrooms… trust me, I’ve had my share of classrooms all the way from east Scarborough to west Etobicoke. With each one I see how I’ve changed and developed as a teacher, both in terms of what I choose to feature on the walls, story books I read and include in the classroom library, learning activities, and materials I use (aka. the third teacher), all the way to how organized I am (both from an administrational way and physical features like how I label and use the same bins…no mismatch for me!). Though I’ve changed many classrooms throughout my 9 years, I have some sentimental pieces that I bring to each classroom such as my number line and letter train anchor chart which I bought when I first got my acceptance letter into my masters program. I can’t believe I’m entering my 9th year of teaching!!

Here’s a little project that I took on to help organize our school’s inclusive books. At my school we realized that we had such great materials but weren’t utilizing them as best we could. We’ve been engaging in weekly, focused discussions on issues pertaining to inclusion, equity, and anti-racism and are striving to increase racial and equity literacy of staff to thereby foster a safe, positive, inclusive, and anti-racist school climate for all of our students. The goal is to have our inclusive library out in the open to foster discussions, allow teachers to easily access books to share with our students, and to frequently change the books showcased in the display case (ages k-8).
Huge shoutout to my childhood friend (literally knew him since I was 3 months old!) for making my vision a reality... I gave him measurements and he worked his creative and talented magic! We wanted to have beautiful looking bookshelves but also needed to have them be portable in case we needed to remove them to display other events throughout the school year.

Today we reread the book, “The Juice Box Bully” by Bob Sornson and Maria Dismondy and had a great class discussion about what bullying looks like, what it feels like, and what you can do when you or someone you see is being bullied. One of my favourite parts of the book is where it talks about a classroom promise… “we promise to take care of ourselves, each other, and our classroom, and to solve problems peacefully. We promised that that in this class, no one would stand by and accept bullying behaviour. When someone acts hurtfully, we all speak up”. I love that this book talks about the importance of standing up to bullying and everyone supporting one another. I also like that it acknowledges that problems are inevitable, but the key is to solving them peacefully. Here are some activities that we did for this book, all of which can be found on for . I hope you enjoy this book as much as my classr and I did.

lest we forget 🇨🇦

This year I have two new students which really changed the dynamic in my classroom for the better. We have been getting to know our new classroom family in many different ways but the most bonding happens when we all play cooperative board games together. At the end of our designated outdoor learning periods I set aside 10-12 minutes of board game time. Research indicates many benefits to playing cooperative board games, including: (1) reduces competition amongst peers, (2) increases social competencies such as kindness, communication, turn-taking, teamwork and collaboration, and builds empathy, (3) fosters inclusiveness, (4) reduces behaviour management issues in the classroom, (5) promotes group cohesion and relationship building, (6) decreases the number of meltdowns that occur when a child loses, and (7) child can focus on strategy and game mastery as opposed to who wins first, just to name a few!

Outdoor learning ✔️. We’re slowly getting used to this new way school life, especially with having no recess like we’re all used to and spending two periods a day doing outdoor learning. It’s definitely a learning curve but my students have been doing so incredibly well, especially given all these new routines. Can you guess what book we’re reading?! I’ll let you know in my next post 😊. ̇d19

Yesterday we read, “Love the World” by and had a class discussion about the things, people, activities, and aspects about ourselves that we love. I really like that this book includes a variety of topics including: spreading kindness and love to ourselves, to others, to animals, and to our environment. As an educator I do my best to have each of my students feel capable, incredibly loved and cared for, and increase their self-esteem as much as I possibly can, on a daily basis. This book is a great platform to facilitate this. As a follow-up activity each student wrote a few things that they love. Two students challenged themselves and attempted to draw in the same style as Todd Parr, using bold black outlines and bright colours. I loved seeing my students’ responses on what they love

Happy everyone! We had a jam packed fun filled day of various activities that had to do with 100! Although I had only 3 of them today, my students were so excited to work on these various multi-sensory activities that were tailored to their individual needs....activities included: writing 100 words they can spell correctly, using a dictionary to come up with 100 words that describe them, counting by tens in both number and word form, building a stable structure with 100 mini solo cups, solving math addition and subtraction problems in 100 seconds, as well as performing various physical activities 100 times. And of course, as it’s my little tradition I’ve been doing over the past few years, we had a cake (aka birthday cake according to my students). We all had such a blast!
P.S. and look at the difference you make in children’s lives and how you inspire them to write and illustrate books. Your books make such a huge difference, even more than you know ❤️.

Happy everyone! I wanted to share a book that my students have been really interested in, called “What Should Danny do?” by . It’s a book where the reader can choose between different scenarios and ultimately affect the outcome of the book. From an Autism teaching perspective, it’s a great way to have discussions about choosing to make “red choices” vs. “green choices” and talk about the resulting positive or negative consequences. It’s a great way of demonstrating the consequences that occur based on our behaviour, without having to actually engage in the positive or negative behaviour itself. Just like ’s series, there is both a home and school version of Danny. One of my students in particular has really taken a liking to the concept of the and has been independently outlining scenarios he can choose to engage in and their resulting consequences during times of escalation. I love that you can transfer the content from this book into engaging social and life competency lessons, and from a literacy perspective, you can have students create their own personal pages of to create a classroom published book! We’re going to create our own “what would room 156 do?” to further solidify the concept of and facilitate teamwork and cooperation.