Creating a well-structured and well-organized learning environment is one of the important aspects for every child with special needs. File folders are one of the best ways to create an engaging and efficient classroom system.
In this blog post, we will be sharing some of the creative and engaging ways to utilize files and folders, which will create a positive and engaging learning environment in your autism classroom.
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Fun & Engaging Use of File Folders in Your Special Education Classroom
1. Creating Interactive Learning Center
Creating an Interactive Learning center with the help of a file folder is one of the effective ways to engage students with fun games and activities. By utilizing file folder games in your classroom not only engages students but also gives them educational benefits. File folders games can help students to improve or develop skills like- problem-solving, matching, and sorting. Additionally, it also helps in differentiating instruction for center activities in the classroom.
2. Creating Independent Work Stations
If you are looking to develop a student's independent skills, persistence, and endurance then creating individual workstations is one of the best ways. With the use of file folders, you can create independent workstations for students, which allows them to complete given tasks without any of their peers or teacher’s help.
Additionally, during this time you can work with a small group of students or with individual students to acquire data for your IEP goals.
Learn some of the fun sensory activities for your autistic kids in a special education classroom:
3. Provide Visual Support Toolkit
Visual support is one of the most effective ways to support children with autism in their learning. You can introduce your children with autism with- “Choice boards”, “I Feel The Need” charts like visual support, which will help children with autism to understand expectations and reduce their stress level and anxiety.
4. Create Communication Stations
You can utilize file folders to create an individualized and personalized communication station for your children with autism. You can create a communication station with different and unique colors for each of the students where they can collect and store their communication-related visuals.
5. Give Instructions In Small Groups
You can incorporate file folder activities by forming smaller groups of students for maximum benefit is also one of the most effective teaching strategies. By identifying the learning needs of each student and who has similar IEP goals, you can form a small instruction group for their benefit.
For example- While you are teaching students certain vocabulary, then you can instruct them to practice those vocabularies together as a group using vocabulary file folders.
6. Create an IEP Goals Folder
Finally, the last way to use file folders in your autism classroom is for their IEP goals! Take each student’s goals and type them out in simple terms that the student can understand. Then glue each goal to a separate file folder. Have all materials that you need to practice that goal in the folder for staff to easily be able to pull to practice. Every time the student practices the goal, put a sticker in a box under it and mark it with a star when they master that goal. This is a good way to help students take some accountability for their goals as well.
One of the best utilization of file folders is to create IEP goals for every student. You can put each and every student’s unique IEP goals in an easier-to-understand language for students in file folders. You can glue each of the goals in the file folders into separate file folders. Whenever any student picks and practices any IEP goals, you must mark it as complete and that they have mastered them. This is also a good way to make sure that students are more accountable for achieving those goals.
7. Teaching Life Skills
Life skills are one of the essential skills that every student should learn, especially for children with autism. However, it’s not possible to teach and learn every life skill in the school but you can help them to learn what to do in various situations when it happens by giving them hypothetical situations and scenarios. You can provide them the file folder which contains, how to cross the road, etiquette to maintain in public places, how to eat in restaurants, etc.
File Folder Is The Key To Make Autistic Classroom Engaging
Children with autism already face many challenges in their academic journey. However, as a responsible special education teacher you must find a way to make the learning environment engaging, interactive, and conducive learning environment. One of the best ways is by using file folders. Utilize all the above-mentioned engaging ways of using file folders to make the learning more engaging.
Additionally, if you want to learn various ways to make learning more engaging and interactive for your children with autism then consider pursuing courses like online Special Education certificate programs, where you will get guidance from top expert trainers, which will also help you to become one of the effective special education teachers in the education industry.
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Written By : Abhishek