Finding Something They Like

  One of my ASD students is a repeater.  He was with me last year as well.  He came in without any language/communication skills, distracting stims and no basic preschool knowledge/skills.  By the end of the year last year, he was carrying conversations, wasn't stimming and was able to identify shapes and colors.  Unfortunately, he needed much more than that to go on to first grade.  This year I knew that we had to get him to master letter recognition, letter sound recognition, number recognition, etc.  I first wanted to tackle letter recognition. Last year, I had sent home a set of flashcards.  They were just handmade oaktag flashcards with just the letters on them.  This year, I had a great idea.  He loves superheros; all of them!  From Spiderman to Batman to the Incredible Hulk; he knew and loved them all.

  So, I jumped on Google and started searching.  I was very excited to have found a wonderful set of Superhero Alphabet Flashcards on TeachersPayTeachers!  If you'd like to check them out yourself, click here.  I printed and laminated two sets of the uppercase set.  I kept one at school and I sent the other set home.  He has been using them for almost a month now and he has gone from recognizing only 3 letters to recognizing 16 letters.  It has been AMAZING!  I am pretty sure he's going through a growth spurt because he can also recognize numbers 1-6 (numbers we have covered thus far) and he can also recognize all of his color sight words as well as the word "the".

  Myself as well as the other support staff keep marveling at how much he has changed over the last year.  It has been such an amazing transformation and he often brings tears to our eyes with his accomplishments.