Peer to Peer Club (Links Club)

My favorite accomplishment this past school year was starting a club with the speech language pathologist (Kelley) at my middle school.  
We wanted to bring more awareness to our school that will hopefully filter into our community about Autism and other disabilities.   I searched the internet for existing clubs that were similar to what I wanted to do. Here is the link to the site I stole most of my ideas from Peer to Peer Project.
During Autism Awareness Month in April I went on the morning announcements and told the students about an upcoming interest meeting about the club.  Kelly and I were hoping for at least ten students to attend.  We were overwhelmed (in a good way) when over 70 students showed up.  At that meeting we showed the presentation linked below and answered questions from students. We told them that this year it would be a work in progress since we were just starting and that if it went well, we would be ready to go full force in the 2017-2018 school year.  
It was so crazy awesome!  My students and the students from the other Communication Behavior Social Skills class all participated. Each student with Autism ended up with between two to eight Links (volunteer students from the regular education classes).  One of their Links would eat lunch with them in the cafeteria and another would hang out with them at Team Time (like recess for middle school).  Some of them even came into my room during activity time (study hall) to play games with my students and work on their communication skills. We had a party at the end of the school year to thank the Links for all of their time.  We played a game called Castle Ball that the students learned in PE, had a water balloon toss, and then came inside for ice cream sundaes.  There were so many smiles.  It was a great experience for everyone.  I can't wait to get it started up again when school starts.  

Autism Presentation

Catching up

So, it has been about 5 years since I have created a post.  I think I am finally ready to do this more frequently- at least more than every 5 years.

I just completed my first full year teaching in a Communication Behavior Social Skills class in a middle school.  It has been a big change from teaching resource for 20 years.  On thing that was new was a focus on celebrating Autism awareness month in April. My students and the students from the other CBSS class created a video that was played during the morning announcements.  My favorite thing we did was starting a new club at our school.  I will tell more about that in my next post.

My classroom door. It says "Together We All Fit."

Copies of this poster were posted around our school. 

I got this from The Autism Helper on Teachers Pay Teachers.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/The-Autism-Helper?aref=sy5kxxyt
Her unit on Autism Awareness is great!