A (2:36)

Which one is Midwest?

B (2:37)

I can't remember.

A (2:39)

Okay, okay. Well, you guys can google that if you want to know. But fun fact, in our new house, his entire man cave den is full of beer signs and most of them are hams. So if you want to see a picture and DM me and say, send me a picture of your basement. I'll do it.

B (3:00)

It glows. You can see it from the moon. So should we get this thing going?

A (3:05)

Yeah. Yes. Let's do it. So for those of you who don't know, Jason does not have a background in education, and he didn't know much about autism or special education until he met me eight years ago. And you guys, I have loved watching him learn and develop amazing connections with some of my former students. Before we get started asking and answering your questions, Jason is here to let you know what National Day it is.

B (3:32)

That's right.

A (3:34)

And also has some fun trivia for you.

B (3:36)

So, Jason, Well, Tuesday the 15th, it's national relaxation Day.

A (3:43)

Oh, my gosh.

B (3:44)

All of the teachers can just take the day off. They can relax. They don't have to go chasing them around, little kids around. It's just. It's National Relaxation Day. Just tell your bosses I said you're cool. You can just go chill, take a break.

A (4:00)

For those of you in education, that'll work, right? You can just take a day off whenever you want to relax. Well, for those of you that maybe are still on summer vacation, take the day to relax. I'm actually going to be up in Canada, hopefully relaxing a bit, and I.

B (4:17)

Promise I won't be out buying more beer signs while you're gone.

A (4:20)

Okay, Deal. All right.

B (4:23)

So I always do a little bit of trivia. This is kind of an odd fact. More so. So did you know that people are more creative when they are in the shower?

A (4:36)

I mean, I get it in some ways, but usually I, like, listen to a podcast when I'm in the shower.

B (4:42)

Right. So do I. But here's the explanation. It says when we take a warm shower, we experience an increased dopamine flow. That makes. Makes us more creative. So now you got an excuse to go hang in the shower a little longer.

A (4:56)

So maybe I should ditch the podcast and you can install, like, a little whiteboard in there.

B (5:01)

In the shower?

A (5:02)

Yep. Away from the water. So it doesn't, you know, get rid of what I write, but just write some ideas.

B (5:07)

I'm on it. Just right on the wall. That's what the kids did when they were little.

A (5:10)

Oh, yeah. I could get some of those little crayons that are meant for the bathroom.

B (5:13)

There you go.

A (5:13)

All right, awesome. We're on it. We've got some plans. I actually get some of the best ideas when I'm getting a massage because I think my mind clears and I relax. And that is one of my most creative times. Did you know that?

B (5:29)

I did not know that. Do you want to know what my most creative time is?

A (5:32)

Sure.

B (5:32)

When I'm watching the beer signs glow, spin, click, make all sorts of noises that drive you nuts. That, to me, is just my little Zen place. And I sit and just think about things and stuff.

A (5:43)

Oh, my gosh. So, you guys, when I walk down into the basement, it is complete sensory overload for me. There are lights flashing, like little sounds, ticking and bright lights. It's like my nightmare. So. But It's. They're.

B (6:02)

They're 75 years old, some of them. That's what's so awesome.

A (6:05)

They are cool. But I wouldn't be able to think or even watch TV with those around me.

B (6:10)

Probably not. Let's get into the questions. Yes, I can talk beer science for two hours. Let's get to the. To the nitty gritty.

A (6:18)

Yeah, he totally would. So Jason is going to read the questions to me, and then I'm gonna explain them to him and answer the question. And since he doesn't know a lot about some of these topics, he might ask me some clarifying questions as he's learning about the topic. So here we go. I'm gonna hand it over to you, Jason. All right.

B (6:38)

The first question is from Marcia in Alabama. How do you help a child that refuses to stay at the table?

A (6:45)

Yeah, this has happened a lot. And actually, Marcia, this is really common, and you've probably seen it a lot in your teaching, especially with our youngest learners. So, you know, it can be frustrating for us because I think our classrooms would run a lot more smoothly if we all could just have kids sit where we want them to sit. Right. One way that I look at it is the child may be at the developmental level of a toddler or maybe even a one year old. And can you imagine trying to get a toddler to sit in a chair for an extended period of time? As we say in the Midwest, Oofta. It's not easy. No. So we want to start by making sure the activities at the table are extra fun for them and shorten duration. Right. We don't want to start by making them sit there a long time. So if they like cocomelon, I'm gonna bring cocomelon toys to the table. Jason, do you know what cocomelon is?

B (7:41)

No, I have no idea what that is.

A (7:44)

It's a cartoon, and it's all the rage. And they have activities and songs and little figurines. Like, you had little people. Maybe when you were little. Yep. Like that. But they're the cocomelon characters.

B (7:56)

It's not that baby shark thing, is it?

A (7:58)

They do have a baby shark.

B (8:00)

That song drove me nuts.

A (8:01)

Yeah. So I'm going to bring the cocomelon toys to the table and play together. And when the child is starting to show signs that they're done, you know those signs, right? They may be different for each child, but as you get to know your students, you know what they are. So when they give signs or show signs that they want to leave, I would model the picture all done, either on a core board or just a larger all done picture by itself. And the child doesn't have to touch it or, or say anything. We're modeling without expectation. So I would say, oh, all done. And then allow them to just leave the area. Another thing you could do is meet them where they're at and work on the floor and wherever they are, whether it's in the play area or maybe in a sensory tent, we can do our activities and work there while we start to introduce feedback. Favorite activities slowly at the table for short periods of time. So I hope that is helpful, Marcia.

B (9:03)

Okay, so the next question is from Jess in North Carolina. My son is three and a half and non speaking at the moment. We are trying to use pecs, but he only seems interested in using them for things he wants, like his YouTube videos. I've listened to your podcasts on types of play, but overall I'm struggling with how to expand his attention to a task. He almost never chooses to play with toys and if he does, he just bats at them for maybe a minute at max. How do we expand his attention so that we can make play and use of pecs more effective?

A (9:37)

All right, that's a great question because I feel like so many of my young students, my three year old students come in in the same place as your son. So I want to start by saying the fact that he is giving you pictures of his favorite things or pointing to them, and that is awesome because he's starting to understand the pictures. Now, most of us aren't going to ask for something we don't want, right, Jason? Like I'm not going to ask for beer because I don't like it. Right. So it makes sense that he's going to just start by asking for the things that he likes that most, which, as with many of my students, the YouTube songs are it. So it sounds like he's in the exploratory stage of play. And this is where kids use their senses to explore objects and toys. So they might be mouthing toys, throwing, banging them, or dumping. We. I have so many students every year that come in and they're the dumpers, right? They dump everything. Do you remember that stage, kids, where they just dump everything out?

B (10:46)

Jason, are you talking about me?

A (10:49)

Yeah. Right. He's kind of messy, you guys.

B (10:52)

So he's kind of a big kid.

A (10:54)

He could be a dumper. We'll just leave it at that. So the best thing you can do is order this booklet from the Hannon Center. You can get it on Amazon and I'll put the link in the show notes, but it's titled Take out the Toys and it's an amazing resource. It's not very long. It has pictures and it's super easy to read. And it gives you ideas on ways to embrace and expand on exploratory play and gently move the child towards functional play with toys. The Hannon center also teaches educators and parents how to interact with their child or student when they're at these different levels of play. So it's going to give you exact, exactly what you can do to help.

B (11:38)

What is the Hannon Center? Is this like a. Is it a facility, a company? What is the center?

A (11:44)

Good question. The Hannon center is a company out of Canada and they do trainings and they help parents be able to connect and work with their children at home. So they're really, really excellent. I just this year went through a training from the Hannon center.

B (12:04)

Okay.

A (12:05)

Called More Than Words. And it's to help facilitate parents to be able to connect and reach and teach their children, their autistic children. So anything from the Hannon center is excellent. But I think when you're looking at play and playing with toys and moving kids from exploratory play, which is that more sensory play, up to doing some functional actions like pushing a car. Right. Putting the people in the bus, those kind of things. This booklet is really, really helpful for that. So we're going to want to meet him, meet your son, where he's at, with the level of play he's at, and that can help improve his attention. So you're going to want to find a bunch of activities that have that sensory aspect that he probably likes and you can switch them out. And a lot of these are like, put in activities. So we're going to put the object in or roll the ball down a ramp. But like, the booklet will give you lots of ideas. I talk about this a lot inside my Autism Little Learners membership too. I've done some trainings, and I have a lot of handouts and, like, activities that can give you some ideas. So that would be my first big suggestion as far as increasing his use of pictures to communicate. Just start modeling the pictures that he doesn't use on his own yet. So pretend you're like the narrator of what's going on, and you show the pictures to go with what you're saying. So if you're going to the bus, you might hold up the picture bus and say bus. Or you could say go. Another example that kind of meshes both the play that you're talking about and the pictures is a simple put in activity. So you might have an empty shoebox. And what I want you to do is take a piece of construction paper, black paper, and make like a little road on the top and glue it onto the top of the box. Cut a hole at the end of the road. And you're going to teach him to push the car down the pretend road and let it drop in the hole. So you're getting that sensory aspect, you're getting that put in dropping. But we're going to push it down the road just a little bit first. And then you can have a picture of in and hold it up as the card drops. So once he gets this predictable routine, we push it drops. We push it drops. Then he's doing that and you're going in in every time that it drops. So that is a super fun activity. And then you can expand it and do like the same thing, but make railroad tracks and have a train go and drop in. So you're working on one step. Play, functional play and adding in the. The visuals. I hope that's helpful.

B (14:57)

You're a genius. You just like this plethora of information.

A (15:01)

It's.

B (15:01)

It's kind of amazing. Like, I don't get to, you know, I. I'm the husband. I'm. We. We get the remote in our hand and turn off our ears. But listening to you talk about this stuff, it's just awesome. And it makes me excited because it's so great to see you in action.

A (15:17)

Well, thank you. Thank you. It's 25 years of doing this and trial and error and figuring out what works.

B (15:25)

Okay, well, calm down now. Don't get a big head.

A (15:27)

I'm not.

B (15:28)

Okay. All right, next question is from Haley. I would love talking points for helping to encourage parents to go to a developmental pediatrician to help them understand their child's diagnosis and how to help parents who are in denial. Lauren also had a Similar question, she asked, what's the best way to approach parents or caregivers that may be resistant? So is this a common thing? You see, our parents, they just have a real hard time when they hear that diagnosis. I suppose it's scary.

A (15:59)

Yep. It's kind of one of two ways. Some parents are like, I know this is what's going on. And they're trying to talk to their doctor, and their doctor's like, hey, he's a boy. Boys can be a little more delayed in their language, and we'll just wait and see. And so when a parent knows in their gut, they maybe don't know it's autism, but they might be wondering. Those are the parents that accept it and get moving quickly. On the other hand, there's parents that maybe just aren't familiar with autism, and they might have an idea in their head of what autism is. You, you know, maybe they know someone who has an autistic child, and they're like, well, wait, my child doesn't do the same things that child does, so it couldn't be autism. Right. So we don't know their background and their history with it with autism. And that can really play into it. It can be a really difficult journey for a lot of families. And so we just need to remember that. And Haley and Lauren, I think since you're both asking this question, it tells me that you're treading carefully because you. That it can be difficult. Right. So the best thing that I have found is really involving the parents in the evaluation process and explaining things to them along the way. Now I'm in a school, and I would help with the autism assessments. So we would do the ADOS test and, you know, observations. We would do a developmental history, all these kind of things, but along the way. So I'll tell Jason, I can see a confused look on his face.

B (17:38)

Adas. I don't know what that is.

A (17:39)

Adas. Yeah. So the ADAS test is the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. And really, if you're watching, looking, and watching us do it, it looks like we're playing. So we are setting up different, like, play situations with toys. And we're seeing. We're watching very closely to see how kids are communicating with us. Are they usually using gestures? What does their eye contact look like? So there's certain things we're trying to draw out of them. There's just so many things that we're looking at. And to someone else looking in, you'll be like, what is going on there? They're just playing. But when we're doing that and we. I say we because Terri is a special education teacher that I've worked with for 10 years and she's retired now, but we did so many adases together. And she taught me and was so good at letting parents know along the way. Like, we do a little activity and then she would describe to them, like, okay, you know, this is what we saw and this might be an indicator of autism. You know, so along the way we're talking about it.

B (18:46)

You're prepping them.

A (18:47)

Yeah. And, you know, not for any reason other than you don't want it to be a big shock at the end of testing. And obviously they know that we're doing autism testing because they have to sign off on doing that test so they know we're looking at it. And so we want to give the indicators that we see along the way, but also share with them things that their child's doing that are really, really great. Because every child's mix of characteristics is different. So if you have the chance to do that now, I know a lot of people, you'll get a child in your classroom and you're not involved in that evaluation process, so you might not have that opportunity. But if you are, that is a really great way to have the parent in there with you while you're doing it and talk about that. Two websites that I want to mention that can be really helpful as you're sharing information with parents are the Autism Navigator and the First Words Project. And I will link both of these in the show notes. But the Autism Navigator has, like, videos parents can watch showing different characteristics or different indicators of autism.

B (19:58)

That's kind of neat.

A (19:59)

Yeah. And because no two children who are autistic look alike. You've met my former students, and they're all very different from one another. Right.

B (20:10)

If they were standing in a room, not, you know, just standing there, I wouldn't be able to know. I would know or expect it.

A (20:16)

No.

B (20:16)

You know what I mean?

A (20:17)

No. And it's kind of. Autism can be an invisible disability because, well, I'm biased. But all of our kids are really handsome and cute and pretty. So all of our students, they're just the cutest. So you don't look at them and say, oh, there's a disability. Right. And plus, you might have one student, one child who is non speaking and another child who's speaking in sentences. So autism looks different in different kids. So this website, these videos, the parents might be able to watch videos that they can relate to. Like, okay, I see that in my child. Yeah, that makes sense. So that might help them to explore. And the First Words project has some handouts that are really great. So if you have a student who's really not using gestures, there's a handout called 16 Gestures by 16 Months. And that can really show parents. Like by 16 months, most kids are using 16 different types of gestures. So they're pointing, they're clapping, they're pretending to wash something, they're doing lots of different things with gestures. And if you have a three and four year old that's not using gestures, that's an indicator. And so that handout and the other handout that can help is 16 actions with objects by 16 months. So I would encourage you to look on there and find some handouts that you can use for parents to kind of gently bring them along and you know, just be honest and gentle and give them grace if they're not ready to accept it yet. Because in the schools, even if they're like, nope, we're not going to go there with that label. We provide accommodations and supports based on their needs, not on their label. So it'll be okay.

B (22:10)

We have one more question left. This question is from Suze. What is your best tip on managing a classroom of 10 plus nonverbal autistic children? Similarly, Kirsten asked, I'm a first year teacher teaching special ed in an autistic class. What's your best advice for first year teachers? How can we make sure that we give our students the best?

A (22:33)

Okay, so for both of you, good training to get everyone on the same page. So I think one of the toughest parts for all of us is training our paraprofessionals or educational assistants, whatever they're called, where you work and live. But you know, sometimes we get new paras throughout the year and or we're not given time to really train them at the beginning of the year and giving them that strong foundation of what autism is, what it isn't, and what kind of characteristics our students show that is really important for everyone to know to be on that same page. And so I just developed a brand new para training series and it is something you can buy and it will have a link so you can send it to your paras to watch. You could either watch it together or you could send it to them to watch, however your school does that. So that is something you can check out. I'll put it in the show notes. It comes with a para handbook and so you could introduce new topics or strategies slowly throughout the year. Or do it all at once and come back to it. So that strong foundation of getting everyone on the same page, that's huge. Then make sure you're setting up good visuals with predictable routines. And it doesn't have to be a lot of visuals, but ones that you can create these predictable routines where the adults learn how to use them consistently and the students come to understand and expect them. So I have a visual support starter set that has my very favorite, especially for new classrooms to kind of hit the ground running. My third thought on this is divide and conquer. We used to say that especially for you sues with 10 kids in the class, set up a physical space so you can divide and conquer. So you might have somebody facilitating play in a certain area with several kids while you work with two kids at the same time at a table and someone else is running like a little sensory group or an art project or something. So as much as you can divide and conquer, that is going to help you. So set up your physical space so you have clear boundaries and areas. That's going to help kids too. Find out what your students like and work those things into the activities. Kind of like I talked about earlier, if they love cocomelon, if they love trains, play doh, favorite characters or toys, try to work that in. And you know, play based learning can be really helpful when you have that many students and they may not be at a point where they're ready to play with each other. Right. So that's why we need to divide and conquer. We don't want meltdowns because everyone's taking everyone else's toys. So divide and conquer, but play based. Then you can kind of go with the needs of each student as you're playing. Take time to build a positive relationship because that is one of the foundations for learning and you need to really, you've heard this probably you need to reach a child before you can teach a child. And the other one is regulation. Make sure your students sensory needs are being met because if they're dysregulated, they're not going to be engaged in what you're trying to teach. And then don't be too hard on yourself. Even seasoned teachers who have been doing this a long time struggle at different points during the year. So reach out to others and brainstorm tough situations and make sure to take care of you. I want to thank Jason for being here with me today.

B (26:15)

You're welcome.

A (26:17)

Thanks.

B (26:18)

It's fun. I miss doing this. This is, it's, it's, it's just always fun and I always learn something new. All right, I'm going to start a Jason podcast and I'll bring you on.

A (26:28)

And I'll learn all about the things he loves. Well, we want to both say good luck to all you new teachers and educators that have been doing this for a long time and we both hope that you have the very best school year. I'm sending a big virtual hug your way because you just finished another episode of the Autism Little Learners Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. If you have had success with any of the strategies that you learned about in this podcast, I would love to hear from you. Send me a DM on Instagram or FacebookismLittleLearners. Don't forget to grab your free visual support stick starter set by going to autismlittlelearners. Com Visuals and always remember to find the good in every day.