It’s May and let’s take a big swig of honesty juice and be real for a moment. We are pretty close to being done. Physically done, mentally done – all of that. And while half of your brain is daydreaming about summer vacation and netflix binging and flip flops the other half of your brain needs to also come to terms with the reality that you aren’t quite done yet. Now don’t go feeling any guilt about looking forward to summer. You can simultaneously love your job and your students while still yearning for summer break.
So in the theme of being mentally half-way done, let’s have some fun this month. Whether your last day is next week or next month, I think this is a great time of the year to take it away from the table. Get your students up and moving, switch it up, have some fun, see if those skills you worked so hard all year are able to generalize to new activities. Because if you feel over it, your students definitely do too.
The goal of ALL Of our teaching is to create skills that are socially significant. We want to teach skills that are functional, important, and useful. In order for that to happen, our learner needs to demonstrate those skills in relevant settings and situations (i.e. new settings!), last over time, and cause changes to other related behaviors. Back in January I talked all about skill generalization. I shared detailed tips on how to plan for this in your instruction. At the end of the school year, is the perfect time to really test for this generalization!
We want to teach skills that last! Skills that last over time and after prompting has been faded! Back in January, I also talked about skill maintenance. Now that it’s May, let’s check back in on those skills you taught all the way back in September and October!
So this month let’s definitely up the FUN and have absolutely no guilt about it. And if you feel like you are getting the side eye from your noisey uptight teacher neighbor because heaven forbid kids should have fun at school, you feel free to give her an earful on skill generalization and maintenance and shut that down. 😉
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