I’ve been doing some work with some girls with Autism Spectrum Condition recently and they have been amazingly perceptive about the reasons why they are left out, teased or ignored by their peers. All of them have talked about not understanding why all the other girls want to be the same as each other and why […]
Primary teachers are the most creative people I know. In just one day they explain, instruct, present, make, demonstrate, coach, advise, organise, design, guide, adapt, mentor, listen, comfort, laugh, cry and …oh and of course, teach! Each day there are around 30 individual human beings in our care and we want to nurture them, develop […]
At this time of year many secondary teachers are thinking about the looming GCSE’s for their Y11’s and may also be thinking about what happens next for their students. If a student has SEND / ASC then there are additional challenges when leaving school and moving on to the next step in their educational lives. […]
image from http://clc2.uniservity.com/ Playtimes can be tricky for autistic children …. It’s unstructured time – which some like (no demands) and others hate (don’t know what to do or how to fill the time). It’s a sensory overload, – which some love because they are sensory seekers and need the movement and sensory stimulation and others […]
I bet anyone whose ever had a specialist in to advise them how to support an autistic pupil has been told to use a visual timetable. I bet it’s written down as a strategy in almost every statement or EHCP for autistic pupils. You might have a visual timetable on your classroom wall. You […]
Many of you will receive a visit or receive a report from a specialist teacher at some point. Emma and I work on building relationship with our schools so that the teachers see us as a support and resource for them as well as someone who can help their pupils. We love to encourage […]
Hilary works with us and is autistic and a maths teacher (amongst her other talents). She has a great way of explaining what being autistic is like and we often talk about the apparent anomaly between her confidence in speaking to someone 1:1 or to a whole group of students, as opposed to being in […]
I was invited to Cardiff and Vale College to do a workshop about supporting autistic students at 6th Form college. Cardiff and Vale college support students between the ages of 16-18 and beyond, including adult learners and in many different subjects, courses and situations. Obviously, all autistic students are different and telling them all I […]
This guest blog is from Joanna Grace who I first knew through her start up of the Sensory Project in 2010. I liked what she was proposing to do and I pitched in a tenner towards it and watched how (thanks to much more generous people than me) the Sensory Projects have grown. In her […]
I’ve been reluctant to wade into the sea of behaviour debate I see in the news and on social media at the moment, but I would like to share some insights from my practice about how autistic students in secondary school use behaviour to communicate that something is wrong. I want to show you how […]