Ep. 26: Independent Activity Schedule

Today we’re focusing on the Independent Activity Schedule and what a crucial element these are for any autism or ABA classroom!

Listen for tips on how to:

• tailor activities to each individual’s needs.
• choose between open vs closed ended activities.
• fade prompts during teaching.
• infuse rewarding activities into the schedule so that the learner enjoys this block of time.
• generalize these activities across environments!

✨Join our Facebook Group for a FREE data sheet packet for activity schedules!⬇️ 
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Transcript

Audra Jensen: You might even get creative and creating like a second identical activity schedule and bring it in for a peer for them to do the same way together, you know, and they love that stuff. I mean, you're typically developing peers are going to love doing that too.

Welcome to the Misfit Behaviorists Podcast. Join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Caitlin Beltran, here to bring you evidence based strategies with a student centered focus. Let's get started. 

Audra Jensen: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Misfit Behaviors podcast. Today, Caitlin is going to be talking to us about creating independent activity schedules, which I think is really apropos to summertime, because I know a lot of people are working on ESY. This is stuff I know a lot of ESY students get to do, do a lot more of in the summer, is working on those independent activities. I love independent activity schedules. Me too. I love getting them independent, so. 

Caitlin Beltran: Yeah, I think they're so important, and when I was thinking about this topic, I think because I work in a public school, and I work in a K 8 district, and I, so I see the way that the classrooms kind of progress, and I think depending sometimes on like teacher preference and schedule, sometimes they're practiced more often in certain classrooms than others, but it's made me realize that we need to have like a big push to have that consistent, solid effort on this skill the whole way through because I have seen so much progress with our learners when they devote consistent practice time to it every day.

And it's not just like, oh, something to do at the end if there's time and it really is such a huge skill. If a learner can structure their time independently, 

Audra Jensen: I love that. When my son was in preschool, we were having a conflict with the district at the time and we wanted more structure in the school district, they didn't have something.

And so we actually put him in a Montessori preschool with support. And a lot of what they were doing there was kind of, you know, independent activity. He thrived in that environment. It's just kind of giving him that those set structured things to do. He gained so many new play skills that way and social skills because they were very structured in teaching them those basically independent activity schedules. So I love this. 

Caitlin Beltran: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, so, I mean, just quickly to highlight, like, some of the benefits that I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen as well, is, again, just, we have so many learners that, can't handle that downtime. Like, when I first started in the field, I remember someone saying, well, sometimes with these types of learners, it's like, work is play and play is work.

And that kind of made sense to me because I saw the struggle that they had during playtime to, like, they didn't know how to share. They didn't know how to. You know, they didn't get enjoyment out of doing the craft that their typically developing peer did, but during work times when it was like, okay, do this, then that, do this, and it was so structured, it would do so well, they enjoyed it.

And granted, that's not every learner, but I do see that. And a lot of my learners who have preference for sameness, not that we want to teach anyone to be overly rigid, but if you're telling like a three, four or five year old, even typically developing, like it's hard for them to sit and say, okay, just go play for a little bit.

That's a skill that takes a while to learn for a typically developing child. So you could imagine for a learner with autism, it could take years or it could never come if we're not explicitly teaching that.

Audra Jensen: They love the structure.

Caitlin Beltran: The structure I mean and I get it. I'm a list maker myself. So I love the structure too. It makes sense to me and so I like to tie it in with those leisure skills a lot because instead of saying like I'll pick something to do or like, you know, how come you're running around the room? You could do a puzzle. You're giving them a system where it's like, okay if I tell you to do your schedule Yes, I'm gonna have to prompt and teach it for a long time Oh, sometimes a long time, but ultimately it's going to be something that you can do by your own, by yourself and hopefully enjoy it.

 It's not meant to be like for me, the way we do it in our school a lot is it's not meant to be your most difficult time of day. We try to include activities that the learner likes, like puzzles or coloring, anything that they prefer doing, we can incorporate it into that schedule. And then also at home, that's the time when, you know, you're going home and it kind of, does get under my skin sometimes when I see these ABA therapists in the home setting practicing the numbers and the letters and the shapes and like everything they did at school.

Whereas to me, ideally, you're coming home from school. Let's teach them to do a home routine, like unpack, put something away, and then engage in some structured leisure time. We don't need another school. 

Audra Jensen: Play with a brother. 

Caitlin Beltran: Right. Pick out a board game. Play that. Then, you know, watch iPad for five minutes. Then maybe do a worksheet for homework. But then 

Audra Jensen: Put the dishes away. 

Caitlin Beltran: Anything. Anything. Yeah, not Yeah. It doesn't have to be always a chore or a leisure. It could just be a lot of different things. 

Audra Jensen: Yeah. I love that. 

Caitlin Beltran: And so it's really just a way to guide the student through,directed tasks. It helps with time management, I think, if you are putting in some of those open versus closed ended activities that we'll talk about.

And ultimately, it helps the family. If that learner who previously needed constant direction to, like, go get a toy. Go get your puzzle. Go get your ball. Like mom's busy. Dad's making dinner or something like that. It's get, you know what, get your schedule. And then now, once that's mastered or close to it, the family has maybe 20 to 30 minutes of time where the learner can occupy themself. And that's a huge skill. 

Audra Jensen: The great benefit to that now, nowadays, it's a little bit different than it was a few years ago, is the, uh, their need to constantly be on screens. You're combating that at home and at school as well, you know, and how do we do that? Well, let's teach them some other things to do and what a great benefit to them to gain skills away from the screens.

Caitlin Beltran: Exactly. And so I just kind of jotted down some considerations that I think of when I'm planning this for learners and I kind of touched on one of them like the idea of an open versus a closed activity. So for example, if you're doing like a 24 piece, Interlocking puzzle.If that puzzle is the first item in your schedule, you know when it's done because, you know, assuming first of all, you're only putting in activities that the learner knows how to do.

Otherwise, it doesn't really make sense. You're teaching too many things at once. The goal here is we're teaching the schedule. We're not teaching the schedule and the five activities that I've put in it. I'm picking five activities that they know how to do, even if they're really easy. But so say I'm picking that 24 piece puzzle, the learner gets the bin, does the puzzle, puts it away.

That's kind of self explanatory versus maybe I have a learner who really likes coloring, and so they could sit and color for a long time, but I don't want to overuse that, but I also don't want them to feel like they have to just do puzzles, so maybe the next option is color for five minutes. And so now I'm putting a timer in the bin, I'm teaching them to get the bin, get their material, start coloring, but set the timer.

And respond to it and clean up and put it away. And of course, you get individualized any and all of those things that you're going through. 

Audra Jensen: Excellent. 

Caitlin Beltran: Oh, and so that kind of brings me to another 1, like, incorporating some of that choice. Like, I've had learners where I'll put 1 thing on, like, okay, the 1st item is.

If it's a home schedule, maybe go put the dried dishes away, but the second item is free choice, you know But it's like structured choices like color, puzzle, iPad or something like that. And then again, I'm trying to mix in some in reinforcement throughout the task or you know sometimes with an early learner will just literally put a little book, a puzzle on each page and they're learning to look at the puzzle. Get the puzzle, do it, put it away, and I'm talking even the inset puzzles.

Then they do the second puzzle, they get it, they put it away, and then the last page maybe says like, I'm done, or something, and they take that to the teacher, and they exchange it, or verbally say it, and then the teacher's like, What? You're done with your schedule? Let's go pick a treat, or go have Two minutes on the iPad so that it's automatically ending on such a positive.

And it's not just like, Oh, good. You finish your schedule time for math. 

Audra Jensen: Excellent. 

Caitlin Beltran: This schedule becomes really rewarding to them. I think the generalization comes into play here because you can, I mean, ultimately, you're probably only going to do this in a couple locations, but if you can replicate it for home, making sure that they're practicing it, you're practicing it with a substitute teacher, it's a great skill to have because we all know in our autism classrooms that, you know, all of a sudden, teacher's out for a week for surgery.

That's going to be a rough week, right? But if you can have that one or two periods where, you know what, this period should be pretty good because they're doing their schedules and we've been practicing it every day since September, so we can take a step back and like catch our breath while we plan the afternoon.

Audra Jensen: The other thing you can think about is if you've taught them, like, use that puzzle idea and they've gotten really good at that, you're going to the doctor's office and you know you're gonna have to sit there and wait and that's hard for them. You could bring some of those puzzles they're familiar with and their little activity schedule and set them down in one of those and, and, you know, help get rid of some of that, time that the waiting time is so hard.

Caitlin Beltran: I was thinking that too, like ways to use this, not just as downtime, but we have a lot of our guys in the preschool who push into, are in self contained classrooms, but they'll push into pre K classrooms, um, general ed for like playtime and it sounds great in theory, but sometimes it's like, again, Oh, that could be the toughest part of their day because you have 12, preschoolers running around and then you have this little guy who doesn't have imitation, doesn't always parallel play the best, yet. You know, they're there for exposure.

But sometimes this past year we've started having them travel with their book. So their activity schedule book. So maybe two kids are at the table toy center and they're doing puzzles and I put the book out in front of him And he's oh, okay now he knows what to do. He gets a puzzle, he does it and we've been able to fade the activity schedule over time to where he is able to just go pick a puzzle and Kind of be part of the natural routine like the other preschoolers, but to start, it was totally unrealistic to expect him that he was going to start just playing. Like pick a toy and play like all the other kids.

Audra Jensen: You might even get creative and creating like a second identical activity schedule and bring it in for a peer. For them to do the same way together, you know, and they love that stuff. I mean, you're typically developing peers are going to love doing that too. And then you're having that connection, like, Oh, I get to do this too. And then you have that kind of that social and connection. 

Caitlin Beltran: That's such a great idea. I'm going to pitch that. Like we need an activity schedule center where like all the kids, because really, who couldn't benefit from that? Yes. Um, and then just making sure like your icons are, I've done it every which way.

So like, maybe we have different color bins. And I have red, green, yellow, and the learner takes like the green square and goes to get the green bin. And that way I can change out those activities every day. Or, you could do it where, like, it has a picture of the farm puzzle, and they go get the exact farm puzzle. So there's, a number of different ways you could certainly do it. 

Audra Jensen: Or you're thinking about, uh, some of your kiddos that have visual impairments, and you can use objects. I mean, you can really just get creative. We used to have a box for each student that had their activities for the day in there, and it would be, you know, we'd change it up every day, but they'd have their specific, um, their carry boxes so that they could carry them around.

Caitlin Beltran: Yeah. I love that. And I love kind of making each learner has like their own system, but you can kind of tweak it and change it up as you go within the system. So I'm gonna, if you're watching on YouTube, I'm going to share some visual, um, sorry, some data sheets that I'm going to put in our Facebook group.

And if you're listening, I'll kind of walk through them. And then just don't forget, you can hop over to the Facebook group, and they'll be posted there for free. So I think I put like two or three different examples, like this one is pretty straightforward, where I listed that kind of task analysis like we talked about last week, um, they're opening their book.

They're looking at the activity icon, they're going to retrieve the item, completing it and putting it away, and then each of those list items until the activity schedule is finished is its own data point, and here I could be generating like a percentage, so out of the, say, seven, six or seven steps of the whole chain. How many were they able to complete on their own? 

Audra Jensen: So you're taking a total task on that one. 

Caitlin Beltran: Yeah. So we're looking for that increased independence over time. And then I'm kind of noting, oh, like at this one was ice cream folder. So maybe next time if they get that wrong, like, you know, start to look for trends there.

And then versus, you know, you could go up to three, four or five activities. I have some where, I have one where you could just fill in your own steps, maybe you're doing it a totally different way, so the step column is blank and you can just edit that. And then I have some where you could be maybe doing this schedule where you know they can get the book, you know they can put it away, but I'm just really focusing on each item and again looking for like patterns, like oh they can do it with puzzles but not so much with beads.

And I've had, sometimes, teachers will say, like, Well, I know they can do puzzles, but, I really want them to learn how to string beads, or I want them to learn patterns, so, like, let's put that in. And, again, I'm like, I know it sounds backwards, but, I don't want to give them new tasks. We're not trying to teach two, three, four different things at once.

I'm purposely picking activities that they really know how to do, or like to do. Because I want them to focus on learning the new skill is the schedule. Once they learn the schedule, we can put all kinds of things in there. But 

Audra Jensen: That's why we call it independent activity schedules. 

Caitlin Beltran: Exactly. The focus is teaching.

Audra Jensen: Not acquisition. 

Caitlin Beltran: Not teaching the skills. Also, I'll use that one next time. Um, so I think I have like two or three different versions here. That you can browse through and then sometimes we just, if it's, you know, if we're just doing like 1 frequency data, we'll put it like at the bottom of their data sheet.

So there's certainly a million ways to track data. But like I said, we have seen so much progress when teachers really dedicate like a chunk of time every day to practicing that. And to me, the payoff is huge because then that learner going from second to third to, you know, fourth, fifth, sixth, they become so independent in that one routine that you never would have thought this is a learner where you can actually step back a minute and let them thrive in that functional area 

Audra Jensen: And again, that's what we're hoping is work yourself out of a job and you get them more independent and that's the whole goal.

So yeah, that's great. I love activity schedules. I think I'm going to go make my own for, um, let's see. How about going to bed at night? Take a bath, put on pajamas, put the fire out. No fire this week. It's very, very hot this week. 

Caitlin Beltran: Pump the air. Yeah. 

Audra Jensen: Turn the air conditioning on, get in the hot tub. Okay, so next week, oh yeah, don't forget to go check out the freebie this week in the Facebook group, and last week's, and every week we try to stick at least one thing in there, um, and check us out on Instagram and, oh, Like or subscribe to the podcast everywhere you're listening to it.

That just helps us get seen by more people. Share it with people that you know, you know, say, hey, we really like this. Caitlin and Audra, they're pretty awesome. Now, if you don't like us, don't share that. Next week, No, no, don't. Next week, we are going to be talking about daily communication with parents and different ways that we've found and used over the years of either, you know, physical communication sheets or kind of creative ones, technology ones.

So we'll talk about different ways to communicate with parents on a daily basis and daily reports and stuff like that. So join us next week to talk about daily reports. Bye. See you guys. 

Thanks for listening to the Misfit Behaviorists. And be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.