The BEST Morning Routine for an Autism Classroom

are you a classroom teacher looking to make your mornings a little bit smoother I'm here to share my classroom routine I am Jen I am one of the bloggers here at the autism Helper and this is my K12 self-contained autism classroom and I'm going to walk you through my morning routine from the minute my students get here till the minute we split up for independent work let me show you this summer I took you on a tour of my classroom while I set it up and one of the number one questions that we got was

what do your mornings look like so I wanted to share our morning routine when you get a good morning routine your entire day goes smoother because your students have started off calm your staff know what to do everybody just kind of Falls in routine and everyone knows what to expect so the first thing that we do we set routines you know I love a good visual and so we have visuals everywhere to help our students along the way this one is about arriving to the classroom so it tells the students step by step what I

expect my expectations in the morning are pretty simple we come in the classroom we greet whoever's in here we take time to greet the child back then I expect students to put their things away in their Cubbies behind me then they go and check their schedule that's where the Magic Begins just like so many things in special ed my schedules are individualized some students have a list some students have icons some students have an object schedule it just depends on their needs the number one schedule that I use are these real photo schedules I think

they're fantastic I color code my schedules so that way it's easy everyone in my classroom is color coded plus I can use these year after year it doesn't have to save the student's name if I wanted to I could put the student's name right there just replace that little strip every year but I put magnets on the back of these so they travel throughout the classroom I have magnetic surfaces literally everywhere so they check their schedule the first thing that it says is morning work so let's look and see what that looks like like I

said everybody is color coded I have covered up names here just for privacy but I'm going to show you what this looks like every student has a color every student has a box that correlates to that color so they come here and they grab their binder and this is where their morning work is located they have a pencil box so they grab this and they grab their morning work binder they come to the table they have a seat and they get started I'm sure you're curious what is in the binder so I am going to

show you this is the autism helpers leveled daily work and this is level 0.5 so this page pretty much stays the same for the entire unit and this picture on the board changes so the students are going to copy the letter a in purple then green then blue then red on their sheet so see how this page correlates to this they're going to color the circles draw the numbers and create the lines it's really simple It's very effective and every day this page changes and so I just put this up on the Promethean board and

from my table my students are able to copy once students are done with their paper they're going to take their paper they're going to come over they're going to put it in the paper paper filer this is where students just put their papers throughout the day then they're going to check their schedule below they're going to see that morning meeting is next and they are going to come to the carpet my morning meeting includes social greetings to each other an emotional check-in and just to see where everybody is we practice counting skills we practice letter

skills phonic skills we practice calendar and we do weather and then we do a follow the rules song and that's it we are wrapped up and done within about 25 minutes and it is the perfect start to the day to support our learning I have pulled songs from YouTube and I've just put them into a Google slide or PowerPoint and then I use that as we go so we've got a song to sing together plus we've got some actions on the TV and it just helps keep engagement so we'll sing a song then I will

do a skill then we'll sing a song that supports that skill and then we repeat that all the way through when you wrap everything together from the time students walk in to their morning work to their morning meeting we're probably at about 45 minutes that's a really good length of time for kindergarten first and second grade and not all of it has been spent doing a task or sitting we get up we dance we do all kinds of things in that time frame plus there's a bunch of transitions in there too so it's a really

good length of time what makes this work is that everyone knows the expectations from my staff to my students those have been very very clear this is the first thing that I work on with new students because if I can set the tone for the morning everything else falls into the place before we leave morning meeting together as a group we do some breathing exercises so we can calm our bodies and get ready for the day it's really important to practice that all together I want to model my expectations because I can't ask a child

to do something that I haven't modeled and I haven't taught so we model those strategies in our morning meeting and that's how we close before we split up and everybody goes their every which direction now a couple of things you don't have to do this right away in the morning I love to do it right away but you might not have time maybe your kids are pushing in right away and you need to do it another time that's okay it's still valuable it doesn't have to be morning meeting it can be afternoon meeting anytime you

can squeeze in whole group this is a great way to kind of set the tone another tip to make your mornings go smoothly have a job for every assistant that you have in your classroom in the morning I can't do everything on my own and I can't expect my assistance to do everything either so we split the roles and we all talk about it and who wants to do each I have somebody who checks folders I have somebody who stuffs homework I have someone who calls if there's absent students and reports them I have somebody

who does bus attendance I have somebody who does um lunch count oh my gosh lunch count always gets us um I have somebody who checks backpacks we take a role in all of that as the morning is going also another tip have your staff run morning meeting you don't always have to be the one sitting up front leading morning meeting in fact I love to rotate my staff through the day it balances the power in the classroom and additionally that's a great time that you can grab another staff member and squeeze in some staff training

with a little bit of planning and a whole lot of routine your students will be calm they will know their expectations and they will be super successful in the morning your staff will love it too because they will have time to connect with the students before the school day starts I absolutely love this part of my day it is my favorite part and I am always sad if I have to miss it because of the meeting so I always try to schedule my meetings after my morning meeting if you've got questions on how I run

morning meeting or what my morning routine looks like maybe I missed something or you want to know more about something definitely let us know in the comments and I'll be happy to answer