Mrs. Drzayich's Class: Week Seven: S.E.P.s and Drama

Hello again!
Legend has it that all teachers breathe a huge sigh of relief once conferences are done, but I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know each of you a little better. Thank you so much for coming to visit me and helping me better understand your goals for your children so that we can focus our work in the right direction. I look forward to interacting with you all more and more as the year continues.

This week we added a new game to our "drama" period on Mondays and Wednesdays. We use this drama time to practice understanding and identifying emotions and their causes through games that require acting. It seems to now be common knowledge that individuals with autism often lack the ability to identify emotions in others and in themselves and have difficulty relating to others because of this. In addition to this, they also can experience difficulty with imaginative play. Research has shown that opportunities to act these feelings out and act out real-life situations in which these feelings occur can help them better comprehend the feelings and their causes.
For example, this game is called "magic wand". I use our "magic wand" to change students feelings or turn them in to different things (i.e. animals, people, etc.) and they have to act this out--they really seem to enjoy it and are getting much better at using their knowledge to respond appropriately. Games like this have been helpful for a lot of students to understand emotions in a broader sense; for example, many students only ever cried like a baby when they were acting out the feeling sad. We talked about how this is not the only way someone looks when they feel sad and practice using other cues that show someone is sad.
For some students who seem to understand this well, I ask more probing questions when I see them acting sad, like why he/she is sad or what will he/she do about it, etc.

Because our class is overall a little younger, we've begun our social skills lessons with these kind of emotion-based acting games. This will help us prepare for the Super Hero Social Skills program that we will begin later in the year. This great program focuses a lot on interpersonal skills and role-playing scenarios that help our students interact appropriately with adults and peers at school and at home. (For a sneak peek at this, click on the Super Hero Social Skills tab at the top of this page--once we begin this program I will be referring you to this tab a lot!)

Anyway, just thought I'd share a little info with you on this because I've been doing a bit of curriculum planning with this lately and wanted to relay some of my excitement for it. :)

This week we have been revisiting and focusing on our goal for improving our classroom atmosphere with kinder words and actions. Here it is: three days (they don't have to be consecutive) with 2 or fewer red points for unkind words and actions. The week before I presented the goal to the class, we were achieved two nonconsecutive days with just 2 red points in this category on Class Dojo. So far we have not yet reached our goal, but we've been looking at graphs of our progress almost daily and the prize--a Friday class mini party--is still waiting for us. :) Encourage your child to remember and work towards this!

We worked yet again on our blogs and there are some new posts to view from your kids--please check them out by clicking on the student blog link above. This has been great practice in using capitalization and punctuation, as well as computer and typing skills and even letter-identification skills for many in our class. I hope to eventually get us to the point where we can learn to find and upload pictures to enhance our blog posts. The kids love it so far.

Great work on your walk-a-thon donations! Our school met its goal of raising over $5,000, which means that select teachers including yours truly, will do a jello slip-n-slide in front of the entire school in the future. I make no guarantees that I will post any pictures of this, but stay tuned for updates as to when this will happen--I know the students in our class are looking forward to it. :)

One other note: please keep our dear para, Annie, and her family in your thoughts this week. Her son has been very sick and we've been missing her since Wednesday. She won't be back until after Fall Break at the earliest, when we hope that they will have things figured out and on the right track. We sure love our Mrs. Bliss!

Coming Up:
FALL BREAK! This means no school on Thursday, Friday or Monday.
We will also be getting another third-grade student on Tuesday of next week.

Congratulations to those homework heros, who turned in all assignments all week!