Sharing is caring!
One of the best parts of my job is that I get to travel around to lots of schools, meet lots of teachers, and share their ideas with other schools and teachers who they may have never even met. As soon as I saw this idea I had to share it. A special education teacher, a speech pathologist, and general education teacher I work with took an idea our team came up with to help a student having difficulties with behavior during transitions and made it more fabulous. We were looking for a way to reinforce appropriate behavior during transitions for a student to keep her on track during the day. The trick was to find a system that a busy kindergarten teacher could implement without a paraprofessional supporting the student, since we had faded most of her support during the day. Someone noted that she really loves ice cream and we thought about doing a token system giving her a token for each successful transition with ice cream as the payoff if she got enough tokens. . We wanted a reinforcement system that didn’t involve the general education teacher having to keep track of lots of materials. That brought our discussion around to using a punch system. She gets a punch on the card each time she makes a successful transition. They took a good idea and made it fabulous–and even more important–it’s working!!! They found that adding the Boardmaker pictures to the card helped her know what she was transitioning to (incorporated a schedule for her) and it also helped the staff to know which place to punch to track if there was a pattern of problems with specific transitions. Kudos to the team at Crestline Elementary for their ingenuity and true collaboration! Maybe something similar will work with some of your students!