Hi, my name is Deborah Nation.
I'm a demonstration teacher for San Bernardino City Unified School District.
I currently teach moderate to severe students in grades
TK, kinder, and first.
And today, I'm going to give you a walkthrough
of what a room environment can look like in a SDC classroom.
So as you walk in, I have a visual schedule ready to go for my students.
This has been very helpful for the students with predictability,
so they know what comes in throughout the day.
It decreases a lot of anxiety with our students.
So as they walk in, I will hand this to them, remind them
to put their backpacks away, and then that's done,
and then we'll go ahead and continue with our day.
They have this throughout, throughout the entire school day
to go back to and reflect on.
One thing we have at our site is that
we turned our office into a calming sensory room.
So the students throughout the day might need a sensory break,
and that would mean they would come in here.
They have the opportunity to listen to some soft music
and just have that quiet time.
Or there might be a student
that just has the wiggles and needs to get get some of that out, the energy out.
So we have a trampoline in here.
They'll take these small little breaks throughout the day with an assistant.
And sometimes we have students that will work for it, right?
Like if they've complete a task,
then they can come kind of have a small break in here.
We call this our communication wall.
And so this we we use it to refer to for our students that are nonverbal.
So if they need to communicate that they do want to go into the trampoline,
they're able to come over here and bring this to a staff member,
or I can walk them to it and ask them, Do you want to go to the trampoline?
We give our students
every opportunity to communicate, whether it be with pictures, gesture,
signing however, because that's
what causes a lot of frustration as they can't communicate with us.
So anything and everything we can do to offer that is very helpful.
Over here we have a small library.
We try to give the students opportunity to have that individual time as well,
so they're able to look at books.
A lot of times you'll find them
reading to their stuffed animals or to another friend.
It's also a little area for maybe just like one to two students.
So it's not so overwhelming.
It's a private space for them.
This is our curriculum frameworks for our district.
So this is the basics, and it involves the five domains for the life skills.
This is more for staff that come in, visitors that come in,
and they want to see what we're doing.
They can come right over here
and it kind of lets them know what we're working on throughout the day.
All the learning intentions are posted with it.
So it does explain why we're doing what we're doing
over here.
We have interactive boards.
Students have the opportunity to to sit down work on numbers,
literacy activities, flannel stories,
and then we have the anchor charts right here for them to refer to.
And this right here is my Circle Time Center.
So this is where I do whole group instruction. We review
the calendar, we over here I can display
educational videos so they'll do the ABCs and their 123s.
I love having the dry erase board because then we can work on circles
and writing numbers, practicing our name.
Once again, I have a visual schedule up here too,
so I can refer back to it and let the students know it is circle time.
It's time to sit down
when we're done with that, we'll put this down here
and then we're going to go into our small group rotations.
So it's nice to have all of this to refer back to for the students
another thing that
we like to do over here as well is just any kind of whole group activity, right?
So if we're doing an activity of taking turns,
we can sit in this whole group and we can work on that together.
When you come over here
I have a math manipulative area.
So we work on touch math colors, shapes and patterns.
And so they have all of these tangibles to work with in the classroom.
We keep it very minimal.
We only bring a couple of things
out at a time because it can be too overwhelming.
Right?
This area right here is our dramatic play area.
So I love this area because we work on role play.
We work on sitting down at a table, setting a table, sharing and taking turns.
All of our classrooms have an independent board
because we do work on our students becoming independent individuals.
So we have their rubric listed
right here as well as all of their IEP goals.
So I have set up my classroom to where I could have three group rotations.
I have the furniture down the middle to minimize the traffic.
So every table will have its own little area.
Every table has everything ready to go the one thing you want to have
is all of your curriculum ready before, right?
We don't want to be scrambling around
looking for everything, so we need it all ready to go.
We have the cabinets
with all of their scissors and markers and pens, everything the staff would need.
And then we also have their mini cabinets.
Every table has a tablet with a communication device as well.
And then we also have just like we had the visual schedules on the wall,
they have their own visual schedule at the table to work with the students
more first than icons.
And charts.
And then we also have token boards.
So these are all the motivators
that we would have ready for the students to get them to work on completing a task.
So what you do want to remember
when you're organizing your classroom is to make sure
there's not too much clutter, right?
You want to keep it very neat and clean,
put away everything that you're not going to use, switch out your anchor charts.
You don't need to have everything up on the wall, right?
Just use what you're going to teach with and then put that away.
It's good to not overstimulate our students with too much on the walls.
Make it very simple.
We have to consider that some of our students, their senses are
are heightened, right?
So they're very sensitive to noise and to lighting.
So consider your lighting, consider the sound in the classroom,
and then consider consider what's on the walls, right?
You don't want to have too much on there because sometimes
the visual is just too much for a student.
So this is my classroom.
It did take me several tries, right?
Every year's a new year.
So what works?
One might not work the next year.
If you have any questions, please, feel free to contact me.