Monday 31 March 2014

Autism & ADHD

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.

4 comments:

  1. Glad to find your website through the challenge. My teenage grandson has autism so I am always looking for new information, not as much for the older child.

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    1. Thank you for commenting. I am now following your blog.

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  2. Very interesting and informative.

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  3. Thank you for dropping by. I am now following your blog.

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