With the end of the year here, I have been thinking a lot about what I have accomplished this year with my students.  This year I worked with four self-contained Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) classrooms.  This was a huge challenge for me simply because of the high number of students on my caseload with pretty high needs.  In reflecting on my year, I decided that I wanted to share some tips of things that helped me get through relatively unscathed. I have been working with kids with ASD for about 13 years now. During that time, I have picked up a lot of little tips and tricks to working with this population of students.  I have had some definite therapy fails and learned from those fails.  Luckily I work with some amazing people who have helped me learn along the way.  I have also been lucky enough to work in a district that has provided me some pretty awesome professional development training. Because of the help that I have received, I have developed some great tips that I want ...

I love working on categorization!  Maybe it's the organization of it all.  I also love the language I can get when talking about items.  So, with my love of working on categorization, I am always looking for new ways to target the skill.  I wanted to make some file folders for my students with ASD, some no-prep worksheets for my preschool and kindergarten students, and of course, my new obsession which is interactive books.  With all of these ideas came my newest TpT product,  Categories ! This fun packet contains everything you need to create three different file folder games, two different interactive books, and worksheets that you can complete during your sessions, or send home for extra practice. I love how the file folders turned out.  I have used them so much with my students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) as well as my preschool and kindergarten students.  There are two different activities contained in these file folders.  The first is Category Sorting.  St...