New, FREE lesson on enraged2engaged.com, E2E Sensory Grounding BINGO!
After one of our functional kids with ASD had a scary meltdown in class a few weeks ago, the group (peer models and students) unanimously voted on a coping skills unit for the next round of lessons. New-teaching-partner Chris, the cadets (peer models), and I have been chipping away on teaching lessons that help students identify and appropriately manage stress triggers at school and at home. I’ve used a lot of lessons from the Emotional Regulation chapter in book 2, and the kids have given positive feedback about them. Our ongoing formative assessments indicate steady improvements for most of the students, and we haven’t seen as many big meltdowns (much to the relief of everyone).
Chris and I have taught some lessons on 5-4-3-2-1 Sensory Grounding but were finding that doing the whole enchilada was often either too much for functional kids to remember in the heat of the moment or that one of the senses (often sound) was more of a trigger than an aid. To that end, our cadets have been helping students focus on single-sense grounding. The student chooses just ONE sense (visual and tactile seem to work the best) and uses a combination of focusing on that sense and deep breathing to self-calm.
In our current class, we have divided students up into small teams consisting of two cadets and two-three students, allowing for lots of immediate feedback and normative interaction with peers. Our current setup of small teams lends itself beautifully to the game-format lessons that I find highly effective.
In order to help students get lots of real-world, repeated practice, I developed a BINGO activity for single-sense sensory grounding. Each group was given a BINGO card; I LOVE creating custom BINGO cards at myfreebingocards.com .It’s a super-easy-to-use, free site, and I can make up custom cards for games like this one in literally under 3 minutes. By creating cards that gave 9 different options for places to go practice single-sense grounding, Chris and I were able to let the students pick and choose four locations (as long as they created a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row) based on their self-identified needs. We did the activity two times–once with tactile grounding and once with visual grounding–and it was a good use of our time.
If you’re looking for a simple, effective coping skills technique taught in an engaging and interactive way, check out E2E Sensory Grounding BINGO!
Tags: secondary special education, coping skills, SECD lesson, life skills
