Amy is a Pre-K Autism Spectrum Disorders Teacher in the Orange County Public Schools District. She and her paraprofessionals work with 10 students throughout the year on learning environment readiness, social behavior, communication, and independent functioning. Amy’s overall mission is to get all of her children to the point where they can start the next school term in the general classes with their peers.
Transcript
>> I'm Amy Caldwell, and I work at Teams Crossing Elementary, which is an Orange County Public School, and I teach pre-k ESC, so I teach ten students that have autism and they're between three and five years old. So the students that I teach that are on the autism spectrum they all come with IEP's, which is an individual education plan, and so it helps us formulate their goals and the kind of academic activities that we need to do with them throughout the year to make them successful. So there's four domains that we work with. The first one is curriculum and learning environment, and the next one is social and emotional behavior, and then we have communication and then also independent functioning. So we work through those four domains to help prepare them for the next grade level. So in my case, I have some students that are three years old that'll stay with me the next year, and some students that are four years old and so I'm preparing to transition them to kindergarten. So the goal for us is that they'll be in the least restrictive environment, so hopefully they would go to the general education classroom for kindergarten in that circle. So in the pre-k classroom, there are a lot of interactive learning activities that we do, a lot of hands-on. So when I'm planning for the day I make sure that there's a lot of movement within our day to make sure that the students are not sitting in one place for too long. They need to move a lot, especially in the beginning of the year. Typically, they can only sit for 2 to 3 minutes, and by the end of the year they can sit for closer to 15. So we're constantly trying to build that throughout the year. So when I'm planning for the day, I take into account how long the students can be actively engaged in each activity. So we start with different centers in the morning that are more student directed, and then we move into a circle time activity that's teacher directed, and then we usually have some teacher directed center activities where we're working on their IEP goals. The students also get speech therapy during the day, and we do that as a whole group. The speech therapist come in and work on their IEP goals and communication with them. And some students have occupational therapy, and we also work with a Special Olympics program to bring some of that into the classroom as well, so the students have a chance to learn how to do things like that as well.
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