Task Boxes

OK - so now you know who I am and why I do what I do.  But what am I doing here? In the blogosphere? Well - I love what I do! I cannot imagine doing anything else, I adore going to work every day (well - most days) and I think I am good at what I do.  Don't get me wrong,  I don't think I'm all that, I don't want to come off as cocky, but I've worked very hard to learn how to teach kids with autism and I feel like I am beginning to apply what I've learned in my classroom. Some of my coworkers (and my husband, but he's biased) have encouraged me to share with others.  As sort of a test drive, I posted about task boxes on my personal blog (http://nicolemays.blogspot.com/2009/03/task-boxes.html) - and got a pretty good response (it's the only post that ever gets read LOL), so I figured I would try it.

My plans for this blog are to have more posts like the following - basically just a description of something I do in my room, why I do it, how to do it, etc.  I hope to intersperse some product reviews/recommendations as well.

So - here is the post that started it all :-)

Task Boxes

match identical objects, originally uploaded by MNicoleM.

OK - so this is a different kind of post than usual :-) My husband is trying to convince me to start a blog about teaching kids with autism ... and in preparation of that, I'm going to try to put some posts up here and see how I feel about it ... since nobody reads this anyway, I figure it won't matter and this way I can at least see if I feel like I could do this :-)

So anyway, task boxes. People with autism tend to be very visual thinkers. There's a program called TEACCH (www.teacch.com) and one of the basic principals is visual structure. Applying visual structure to learning activities leads to task boxes. They are self-contained activities (in this first instance, the activity is matching animals). The student can see how much work there is to do and can tell what to do by looking at the materials. The teacher can work one on one with the student on a new activity or skill and when the student starts to become comfortable with the activity, they can work independently to practice the skill. This is more meaningful for the student than completing worksheets because the materials are manipulative and it is also more practical, especially if the student isn't able to read and write (which would make completing a worksheet independently pretty difficult). Additionally, because students with autism often need lots of repetition and practice on a particular skill, you would have to make several copies of the same worksheet and waste a lot of paper - this way you just pull the pieces off and the task is ready to be used again for continued practice.

Task boxes can be purchased from companies pre-made, which I often do (My time is sometimes more valuable than my money and I would rather buy the materials ready-to-use because I don't have time to create them). Some companies I have purchased task boxes from are:
Shoebox tasks
HOT ideas

Some good books with examples of tasks are:
Tasks Galore
How Do I Teach This Kid?

and some websites with awesome examples are:
Preschool Fun
Autism Teaching Tools
SCATC

As for making them - you can find lots of "file folder game" activities for regular ed students online and in teacher stores, many of those same activities work well with students as "task folder" activities. Also some commercially produced materials lend themselves very well to task boxes. Below is a size sorting task I made with a size sorting kit from Lakeshore (www.lakeshorelearning.com) as well as a patterning activity and another size sorting activity I made out of materials from a commercially produced kit I bought from a teacher store or catalog (don't remember which one ...). Pretty much any teaching materials can be glued and velcroed to create a task box.








I have also used erasers - they make erasers in all kinds of shapes and you can do lots of matching/sorting/counting activities with those, counters, those foam shapes, buttons, beads, dollhouse furniture and accessories, etc. I went to Hobby Lobby and Michaels, bought lots of these things and made tons of task boxes in the past few weeks (I have a student teacher and have time to do things like this now lol). Here are some more examples of the ones I made. For the "box" part of it (the base), I used little plastic baskets, lids to paper boxes that copy paper comes in, plastic trays, boxes meant to store and file photos in, and sometimes just a piece of cardboard or posterboard. Anything sturdy enough to attach the base pieces to!


Sorting by shape using foam shapes:


Sorting by category (things in the kitchen, things at the beach, things we eat, desk items, tools) using scrapbook/craft buttons:


Sorting nonidentical objects (balls, dogs, and birds) with miniature dollhouse accessories:



You can see more examples of mine here

I owe it all to Andrew!

Me and Andrew in 2002

Well hello! I am Nicole Mays and I teach students with Autism.  Several people have been encouraging me to start a blog about teaching students with Autism, so here I go.  I figure the first post is a good place for an introduction and brief history.

Let's travel back to 2002.  I was a senior in college at North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega, GA.  I was a music major, with a concentration in clarinet performance.  During school breaks, I substitute taught in my hometown of Winder, GA at Kennedy Elementary School.  One week, a parapro in one of the self contained MOID classes (moderate intellectual disabilities) was out for a week and I was her sub.  There, I met a young man named Andrew.  I instantly fell in love with this boy and was fascinated by him.  He had a disability called Autism - something I vaguely recalled hearing about but wasn't all that familiar with.  Each evening that week, I searched the internet and read all I could about Autism and Fragile X (his diagnosis).  I knew, somehow, that my music degree - that I was about 3 months away from completing - would never be used.


Andrew, 2004
My cousin had just graduated with a degree in journalism and gone back for her Master's degree and initial certification in education and was going to start teaching the coming fall.  I called her, got the information about the degree program and began looking into the special education program there.  Things started to fall into place.  I discovered that I could teach on a provisional certificate as long as I was enrolled in a certification program (a very controversial concept, I know - and I'm not sure how I feel about it as a whole, but it certainly worked out for me!).  Andrew's teacher was wanting to transfer to a general education class but the principal was having trouble finding a replacement sped teacher to take her place.  I was able to graduate with my BS in music, enroll at Piedmont in their MAT program for sped, was hired at Kennedy to teach on a provisional certificate, and from there life fell into place. (On a side note, this is also when I met my now-husband - the spring of 2002 was truly a life-altering time in my life on many levels!)

The degree program that I was in was a Master of Arts in Teaching degree for E/BD, SED and Autism.  The class I was teaching was a MOID class.  I took the Praxis in E/BD, K-5 gen ed curriculum, and the adapted curriculum (to be certified to actually teach the class I was in).  Just for the heck of it, I also took the Interrelated Praxis. That first year, especially the summer before I started teaching, I did a LOT of reading, researching and learning on my own. I went into teaching having had no education courses, no student teaching, no training in how to write an IEP or anything.  I spent the entire summer poring over my students' IEPs, ordered all the Wrightslaw books, joined CEC and NASET and read all the literature I could find through them.  I was so terrified of stepping into the classroom and messing up - I mean, these were children's lives I was dealing with! But that's another story ... I'm telling the story of how I became so obsessed with autism LOL.

My first class
So ... that first year, there were 3 students in my class who were served under an Autism label and one other who had a medical diagnosis but was served MOID through the school.  The other 4 students in my class were just your typical MOID students.  And I adored them all, I was determined not to have a favorite - but if I *had* allowed myself to have a favorite, I admit it would have been Andrew.  That kid was (is) just an amazing kid - and I give him full credit for leading me to where I am today.  Though in my "personal" education I was learning about kids with intellectual disabilities, my "formal" education was in E/BD, SED and Autism.  And honestly, the 4 kids in my class with Autism were much more challenging than the others, so I was spending more and more of my "free time" trying to understand this enigmatic spectrum.  And as anyone who has experience with ASD knows, the more I learned, the less I *knew* ... and the more curious I became.

Andrew at a reunion party at my house in 2008
Two of my professors in the MAT program encouraged me (relentlessly) to pursue my PhD, so as soon as I graduated, I applied to Georgia State's PhD program, with a concentration in Autism.  That's where I am now, I have one more class then my dissertation.  And still - the more I learn, the less I realize I know and the more I want to continue to learn.  I also have a very taboo plan for when I graduate - instead of joining the faculty at a research university (like the PhD program is preparing me for), I intend to remain in the classroom.  Sure, I may teach some college courses in the evenings.  And of course I want to continue to do research.  I just can't imagine leaving the classroom!! My eventual goal is to open a school for kids with moderate to severe autism either in or near Winder.

OK - back to the journey.  When I graduated with my MAT, I was still teaching students with MOID.  There were 10 students in my class, 5 of them had autism.  I also had three students who were in wheelchairs.  I ran into lots of problems trying to accommodate all of my students.  First of all, just setting up the classroom created a perdicament - for the wheelchairs, I obviously needed open areas so the kids could have access to everyting and be able to maneuver around the room.  For the kids with autism, however, I needed boundaries to define different areas for different activities and to discourage elopement.  Another problem arose in that some of my kids with autism had aggressive behaviors - and one of my students was medically fragile! And one of the kids with autism liked to try to push over the standers and other equipment - even if there was a child in it! How on earth do I make sure the students are safe? Not to mention that a little girl with Down's Syndrome was very affectionate and liked to hug people - and one of my boys with autism was very tactile defensive and reacted very negatively to being hugged, especially without any warning.  What do I do to keep her from hugging him and him from hitting her?? And then you get into instruction - there are diametrically different methods for teaching kids with severe autism and teaching "typical" kids with MOID.  I was basically having to run two separate classes within one classroom with one teacher. But - there was another MOID class across the hall - and about half of her students had moderate or severe autism as well.

Our school system did not have an "Autism Program" or an "Autism class", so I asked to just have the two MOID classes re-distributed, having the kids with more severe autism in one group and the more typical MOID kids in the other - and of course, I requested the class with the kiddos on the spectrum.  Since then, there is still no Autism program nor does there seem to be a plan to develop one in the county.  My class continues to be made up of students with severe autism (the classroom is still technically a "MOID class" - even though none of my students' IQs fall in the moderate range according to their test scores, ... which I don't necessarily agree present accurate representations of their abilities anyway - but those are other soapboxes!) For all intents and purposes, it may as well be an autism class.  Or an ABA class, whatever you want to call it (btw, I have taken all of the coursework to be a BCBA but have not sat for the exam yet because I don't have the supervised hours yet).


Me with Andrew in 2007 at our county's Special Olympics
Anyway, that's how I got to where I am today, and the role that Andrew played in changing my life.  This was a long first post, and subsequent posts will be more focused on strategies, methods, techniques, activities, etc. - on *HOW* I teach kids with autism - but I felt that an introduction was a good place to start.  :-)