“Goin Back To School”

“Goin’ Back To School!”

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POPULATION: Children ages 3-9.

GOAL: Impulse control, turn-taking, social skills, memory recall, cognitive skills, communication skills, divided attention, etc.

STEPS/TIPS:

1. Upload “Going Back To School” to an iPad/Tablet or print them out and laminate them for a visual aide.

• Decide what level of prompting you want. Do you want to leave the pages blank for the client to think of ideas independently? Do you want to have a couple of choices and work on them verbalizing/making a choice using an AAC device? What are you targeting is going to determine this step!

2. Client can either sit and wait during their turn, or they can have instruments. I’ve done this a few ways:

• Individually: Client plays an instrument and sets it down when its their turn to choose
• Group: Clients use body percussion while waiting; have to stop when one client has a turn
• Group: Clients have instruments (small) and set them down on the floor when each group member verbalizes/selects their choice

3. Sing beginning of song and when you get to “What should I bring?”, use exaggerated affect/auditory cue to support client’s ability to stop playing and shift their focus.
4. Prompt client to make a choice then sing what they chose. Sometimes I use this even as a songwriting opportunity and put the words directly into the visual aide as well.
5. Repeat!

KEY ELEMENT: The key element in this intervention is the type of prompts that are given for the support need of your client. Sometimes this mean you need to sing an extra “I should bring a…” for the client, sometimes you may need to gesture at the visual choices, etc. This all depends on your client!

ADAPTATIONS:

1. Bring a teacher into this one if you are in school!! Kids love it when the teacher gets involved, or when some other adult joins into the fun. It will continue to generalize those social skills that the kids are working on and everyone will get a good laugh!
2. Make this really easy for clients who need maximum support by having a choice already present for each prompt. This will focus on the client identifying the particular item (make sure they actually use it in school– I learned pretty quickly that some things are quite literally, “old school”.

Hope you have a lot of fun with this one! The end of summer is not always easy, even for us. This intervention can be a really fun pick me up, especially when kids get silly with their answers.