This makes my teacher heart happy. A lot of those things are best practices for ANY kid, not just those with a diagnosis. All classrooms in our school have (or are supposed to) a TAB spot (stands for Take a Break). It's an area to go when kids need a break. It's not a timeout space or a bad space, but a space to go and self-regulate. In mine I have one of those soft, saucer chairs with a pillow. A small bath rug underneath, and it's surrounded by bookshelves, so it's kind of by itself. I also have some calm down tools in a bin (books and stress balls right now, I started the year with more, but the kids couldn't use them appropriately).
The other students in my room are wonderful with my boy with autism. He went on vacation early in the year, and while he was gone we got parental consent to show an Arthur video about a boy with Aspergers, and we had a talk about the student and what he likes/doesn't like. When we walk in line, every student wants to hold his hand. Some students got too comfortable trying to help him out, and I had to tell them to stop because I want him to be independent as much as possible. Independence is a big thing in my classroom, even in first grade. I think the teacher he came from in kindergarten did a lot of things for him, which might have been where some of the issues last year came up.
Also, you touched on the physical environment of the classroom, and clutter is not recommended for any student. All student get distracted by too much on the walls. I also keep my classroom very open and easy to move around. Most of my bookshelves are up against the walls, rather than sticking out into the room. I had my SMART Board moved over the summer to get my classroom exactly how I wanted it, and I LOVE the set up this year. So many of my coworkers have come in and said how much they love it. Which is good because I put in A LOT of hours over the summer getting it just right!
Sorry, I could talk about teaching and education all day!
Yeah, I really am sad I didn't push for a diagnosis earlier for DS. We didn't want to "label" him and make the bullying worse, but last school year, we got to a point where we just couldn't wait...it wasn't safe for him at school and the teachers kept telling him he needed to stop reacting when kids did things to him because that's WHY they bullied him...to get the reaction. They weren't giving consequences when the kids did stuff. Like...one day during recess, he was playing soccer with some boys and one of them said "Let's play a NEW game and it's called 'Kick the ball as hard as you can at A'" and they took turns pummeling DS with the ball. He starts screaming, a teacher comes over, he tells the teacher what happened, the boys deny it and say they were just playing soccer and he was accidentally hit. The teacher tells DS to go play somewhere else.
A new girl came to school and befriended DS, they played together every recess and had fun...and then one of the kids told her that she'd better stop playing with DS, because if she didn't, she'd get it. She didn't listen and the kids started pushing her down, stealing her things, writing in marker on her gym clothes...so she was afraid to play with him. This was in her first week at the school. Her mom even went to the teacher and told her what the kids had said. But there was no "proof" that the kids said this, so they talked to the whole class about not leaving anyone out, asked if someone would be willing to play with DS that day, no one volunteered, and they couldn't force them, and no one would let DS join their reindeer games and the teachers wouldn't let him stay inside to play.
I walked up once when he was in 2nd grade to find 2 boys 3 years older than him slamming him against the brick wall. I went to the teacher and the boys had to say sorry and they wouldn't do it again. That was it. Another mom turned it in a few weeks later when she saw the same boy following DS around jabbing him with an elbow at lunch recess...again, he had to say sorry and that was it.
A teacher walked into the locker room to find a boy snapping DS with a towel, taunting him "Wanna cry? Go ahead....CRY!" The kid was sent to the bathroom to get dressed. And that was it. The teacher SAW it happening, and did nothing to the boy.
Then they merged with another school, got a new building and it got even worse, because now, there were twice the kids to bully him. There were more kids who bullied him than not. We got a diagnosis and pulled him out of school 2 days later. We kept him home for a month and got urgency status to get him into the special education school and it was like a magic pill. He is a completely different kid than he was just a year ago. I tear up just thinking about what he was suffering before and now he's a happy kid.
But this school is just amazing. I forgot to mention the max is 14 kids to a class....that's something else that would be good for ALL kids, not just those with a diagnosis. Most of the kids have some sort of stress reliever thing in their desks, like stress balls, or DS has a Tangle. But the Nevenruimte (that's what the little room is called) is just like you said...a place for them to take a break. It's not used for punishment. Teachers are trained to look for behaviors that signal a kid needs help....like if they are not doing their work and they are tapping their pencil, there's probably a reason for it..they don't understand what they are supposed to do, or something is bugging them, so then the teacher goes and talks to them to find out. And there's a teacher and an assisstant for every class, so when the teacher is busy helping one kid, the assisstant watches over the class. They keep the doors open and there's a sort of....patrol is the wrong word....that sounds punative, but it's really just a teacher who is ready to assisst if a kid has a meltdown, they hear it and can go get the kid out of the room before the other kids get too overstimulated. And if they remove a kid from the room, the psychologist is there to talk it out with them and find out what happened. And whenever there's an incident, the teacher calls and tells you what happened, WHY it happened, and how they handled it. It really fills in the gaps because DS will tell us what happened, but you often can't make sense of it.
Last year he came home and said he had been punched by this kid and everybody was yelling at him and he didn't know why. It turned out that they had been given instructions during PE...there was some sort of testing they were doing and they had 2 groups...one doing the testing, and one playing a game. Once you were done with your test, you were to go sit on the bench and wait for your turn to play the game. Only DS missed that instruction and tried to join the game immediately, so the other kids started telling him he was supposed to go sit down. He took it as all the kids yelling at him and didn't know why, he started to scream, and one of the other kids is overly sensitive to noise and just started swinging and punched DS. The teacher called, explained it, and we worked out with the teacher how to handle that next time...DS didn't understand that he was allowed to leave the situation and where to go to do that if they weren't in their regular classroom where they have the Nevenruimte. So we discussed it with the teacher, and he sat DS down and told him exactly what to do if he was overwhelmed when they weren't in the classroom....where he was allowed to go and what the procedure was. Pretty incredible. A few weeks later, there was another situation and he knew exactly what to do and he just walked off and found a quiet spot until he calmed down. And the teacher called to check up and to fill in the gaps again. Fantastic. I could go on and on. It's really how education SHOULD be.
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