Being thrown at the classroom

[jackjacksmummy]

My son is 8 and has had his statement for a year. He has high functioning autism but also has many learning disabilities for which he has interventions for.

Recently he has been struggling with coming back into the classroom after an intervention and becomes disruptive - for example, makes inappropriate noises, falls on the floor.
Im guessing that this is because he's missing class input and then when he goes back in hasn't got a clue what he's supposed to be doing and can't just pick it up from what the other children are doing.

The teachers response is to put him outside the classroom to calm down which whilst I get that he shouldn't be disrupting the other children's learning, equally he shouldn't be getting to the stage of disruption and better planning would prevent possible disruptions!

Either way I don't think it's right that a statemented child is being thrown out of the classroom - he's not violent, he's not rude to others, he just doesn't know what is expected of him.

[jackjacksmummy]

Title should read "thrown out" not "thrown at"

it would hurt a lot if he was thrown at a classroom!!

No need for replies - it just makes me feel sad. I've spoken to his teacher & the SENCo today and we're having a rethink of his provisions.

[jackjacksmummy]

Yes, I think that's the route we're going to go down. The teacher wants him to have more classroom based support so that he can do the work in class with the other children but he still needs the extra reading/jump ahead/social skills interventions that are happening.

[AgnesDiPesto]

Or maybe the teacher could have a list of instructions on his desk of what he needs to do and he can tick off. Or a transition activity eg a wordsearch or list of sums, just so he has something to do on his desk waiting. The person supporting him with the intervention could even give him the sheet and he could carry it back in to ease the transition So he knows what he will be doing before he comes back in.

Does he have a token system? Giving tokens for being sensible as he is walking along / sitting back down with a motivating reward when he gets his tokens? Be really clear about the rules (even write them down) eg we are going back to class now, you need to walk nicely and quietly, sit down and start work.

With ds if he started being silly we would just pull him back to the point he started going off track not wait for it to get that far eg go back to the corridor and get him to do it again sensibly. You might have to just reward with tokens every few steps to start with. The person walking back with him might just have to stop walking and pause putting tokens on until he has calmed down and then start again for any positive behaviour

This is the sort of thing a properly designed motivating behaviour system should be able to nip in the bud quickly. If the school don't know how to design one they should get behaviour or autism outreach in to advise. Working for positive rewards works much better for ds than punishments. He loves his tokens and can change his behaviour quickly if he sees he's not earning his reward (he gets little breaks eg read a book in book corner, go on computer etc for few mins every 20-30 mins through school time)

[jackjacksmummy]

Thanks Agnes, some really good ideas - I'm definitely going to suggest some of these in this meeting they're proposing.

[AgnesDiPesto]

You're welcome. Getting him to repeat back rules works for ds too.