Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA

This week, we’ve got a roundup of the best products you can get from your local dollar store. As we all know, dollar store purchases can be hit or miss. You might spend 99 cents on something that occupies your child for hours, makes dinner preparation take ten minutes less every night, or solves party planning woes. But you could also end up with a load full of broken plastic knick knacks that are headed straight from your shopping cart to the trash.

I’ve been there, both as a teacher and a parent! So in this post I’m going to share some of my favorite dollar store purchases with you – all based on my own experience. Next time you’re looking for a cheap and easy way to brighten your child’s day, use this list as a handy guide. It will show you what’s a good idea to get from the dollar store and what you might want to spend a little more on elsewhere.

Containers – yes!

Are you always pulling your hair out looking for clear containers to store little knick knacks or small pieces of toys in? Small containers can also be useful for toys on the go that aren’t normally easily packable, like LEGO. Look for containers throughout your local dollar store, including in sections like the toy aisle and the toiletry section. Sometimes you might find the perfect container that already contains something. – You can empty out the pre-filled contents and use it for the item of your choice.

Art Supplies – it depends

Art supplies vary in quality at the dollar store. Often, crayons purchased at the dollar store aren’t satisfying to draw with. You might be better off purchasing that item online or for a few dollars more at Target. But coloring books, glitter paper, construction paper, and other art supplies can be a great buy at the dollar store – especially if you go through them quickly.

Balloons – yes!

Did you know that many dollar stores will fill mylar helium balloons for you, for only a dollar? This is much cheaper than the cost elsewhere – so much so that you don’t have to wait for birthdays to get your child a special balloon anymore. If they love balloons that float when they carry them, you can now affordably add this item to your reinforcer repertoire.

Puzzles – no

Unfortunately, puzzles purchased at the dollar store look very cute, but they are hard to handle. This is especially true for:

– Young children

-Children with autism who struggle with table activities

-Children who struggle with fine motor issues to complete

The pieces are not thick enough to be easily picked up, maneuvered, and placed in their spots. For puzzles, stick with a tried and true brand like Melissa and Doug.

Kitchen supplies – yes!

Do you have a child who loves pretending to cook, or being near you when you are cooking? You can find a large selection of kitchen supplies at the dollar store. Some of them are useful enough that you might find yourself adopting them for your own use. Try finding a pot, a ladle, and an egg timer at your dollar store and see what kinds of pretend play games you and your child can come up with.

Reward Box Items – yes!

Anything from beads to action figures to silly putty can be found at your local dollar store. You’ll also find a wide selection of stickers, play dough, and seasonal or holiday themed items. The dollar store is the perfect place to fill and refill your reward box. This is helpful especially if your child is earning several rewards per day, as part of a first-then system or star chart.

Happy shopping!

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA Courtney is a behavior analyst, educator, and writer in the Pacific Northwest. She has over fifteen years of experience in the field of autism services, and over ten years of master’s level experience in classroom teaching and ABA therapy. Her areas of expertise include infant and toddler development, parent coaching, ABA clinical leadership and training, P-12 special education, and case consultation for children and young adults with autism and other special needs. Courtney lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.

Behavior specific praise, or “BSP” as many autism professionals refer to it, is an extremely useful strategy to make part of your daily conversations and routines. But behavior specific praise doesn’t necessarily come naturally, or happen if you’re not thinking about it. That’s because general praise is usually the first thing that comes to the tip of your tongue when you want to acknowledge that your child did something well, or acted kindly, or met your expectation, or followed an instruction. General praise is the use of phrases like “good job,” “nice work,” or “way to go.”

General praise is a good start. After all, it’s certainly better and more effective to be delivering praise in the first place rather than not at all. You could start monitoring your own use of general praise throughout the day, and chances are you’ll automatically start to do it more, just by thinking about it.

After you’ve got the hang of integrating general praise into your natural conversations and routines at home, it’s a great idea to start converting some of those general praise phrases over to “behavior specific praise.” The concept of behavior specific praise is actually very simple. Here’s what it means:

What You Say Has Power

Research has shown that for children with autism, what happens right after a behavior impacts the likelihood of that behavior happening again at some point in the future. This is called reinforcement. Reinforcement can take many forms. Often for children with autism it involves a small preferred item or a small symbol for a token system that can later be traded in for a preferred item. We know that by combining something with a reinforcer, we can gradually condition that something to become a reinforcer on its own. By using praise statements like “Good job putting the cap back on the pen” at the same time a preferred item is given, we can expect that eventually praise statements will function as a reinforcer themselves.

We also know that attention is a powerful reinforcer on its own for many children with autism. By structuring “attention” to include behavior specific praise statements like “You are working so hard to stay calm right now” we create a reinforcement framework that can be replicated by other adults in the child’s life in addition to parents, such as teachers.

Being Specific in a Situation That’s Not “All Right” or “All Wrong”

Behavior specific praise is also useful when you want to shape your child’s behavior. For example, your child might be learning to eat with a spoon independently, but making a mess at the same time or throwing food on the floor. You could use behavior specific praise to isolate the behavior that you want to encourage by saying “You are doing a great job holding the spoon and scooping food with it to take a bite!”

By looking for the specific behavior that you can praise, and then talking about it, you will increase the opportunities you have to coach your child on what you want them to do.

Modeling and Setting an Example

Behavior specific praise is also a great way to increase the amount and variety of language you are modeling for your young child who is learning to communicate. Think of it as a way to accomplish two goals in one: modeling language about the environment and what’s happening in it, and providing reinforcement for a positive behavior. Additionally, for older children, using behavior specific praise sets an example for how to use positive praise statements with siblings in the home environment and peers in the school environment.

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA Courtney is a behavior analyst, educator, and writer in the Pacific Northwest. She has over fifteen years of experience in the field of autism services, and over ten years of master’s level experience in classroom teaching and ABA therapy. Her areas of expertise include infant and toddler development, parent coaching, ABA clinical leadership and training, P-12 special education, and case consultation for children and young adults with autism and other special needs. Courtney lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.

Does your young child with autism struggle to complete routines or follow instructions, even when you are right there to help them? Are you at your wit’s end of trying to figure out how to motivate them in the moment? Do you feel down when your child refuses to do things you are confident they CAN do…but for whatever reason, WON’T do sometimes?

Enter the star chart, also known as a token system, also known as a fixed schedule of reinforcement.

“Star charts” don’t have to use stars at all – any kind of symbol will do. A great way to visualize how a star chart works is to translate it from your own experience. For example, have you ever tried to create a habit of exercising, or meet a different type of goal that required you to do a specific activity one time per day? You may have used a basic wall calendar to track this, by marking off each day that you exercised on the corresponding date box on the calendar. Maybe you set a goal for yourself for a minimum number of days to have a mark by the end of the month to achieve some type of reward, like a special meal or a new item of clothing.

Star charts for children with autism work on a much shorter scale, but the overall idea is the same. Star charts are a way of tracking progress toward a large goal, or a series of basic actions, using tokens to signify each action which, when enough are collected, can be exchanged for a preferred item or activity (the “reinforcer”).

Now that you know what a star chart is, here is a simple method to follow when introducing star charts with your child – or reintroducing them after a long break:

Start With One Star

If you tried a star chart before and it didn’t work, chances are there was too much of a delay between earning enough stars to get a reward and actually getting that reward. If your child needs a lot of help here, refer to my post about “First-Then Schedules for Beginners.” First-then schedules are a great precursor to star charts. They address the same concepts, but the connection between following an instruction or doing a required task and obtaining reinforcement is more immediate than with a star chart. 

Another way you can start with one star is by filling in all the previous stars before beginning. For example, if you are introducing a star chart for a new difficult activity like cleaning up toys, sitting for a set period of time at the dinner table, or completing the toileting routine, you might have a chart with 5 to 10 stars. When filled in, they would result in a choice of a preferred item or activity. For this new difficult task, though, you could fill in all but the last star before starting. Then, you can help your child complete the required task, give them the last star, and then immediately provide the reinforcer or reward.

This is a good strategy to use if your child is new to star charts or out of practice, or anytime you introduce a new required task or set of tasks that they aren’t familiar with, or haven’t previously been successful with. 

Don’t Let Too Much Time Go By Between Stars

If your child is now used to the routine of earning stars and then cashing them in for a reward, that’s great news! You might even get into the habit of not giving them a star every time they do a task. Some of this drift is natural and expected, especially in the home routine where there is quite a bit of on-the-fly decision making associated with how to modify activities for the whole family to successfully move through each scheduled part of the day. This can even be a great way to start naturally “fading” reinforcement so that your child learns to do tasks when they are asked, whether or not reinforcement or tokens are awarded right away.

However, you do need to be careful here. When too much time goes by between awarding stars – and as a result, the final reward – the strength of the final reward could be diluted. If this happens too often, you may find that the token system is no longer working. When this happens, you’ll need to scale back and award stars more frequently for awhile. Sometimes, you may even need to scale all the way back to one star, or first-then, when this happens.

Use a Variety of Reinforcers, and Changes Them Often

This is one of the hardest things to do, because it requires you to stay on top of your child’s preferences and likes, and plan ahead to make them available as rewards for cashed-in stars. One way to make this process a bit easier is to design your reinforcers around a few themes. For example, if your child really loves Daniel Tiger, you could get a variety of Daniel Tiger books, action figures, party supplies, and other small items to make available as reward choices. You could also expand this theme into adjacent themes, such as tigers or animals that talk. You could also take an activity that is shown on the show, like baking a cake or having a picnic, and do an experience-based reinforcer. In this type of scenario your child would be allowed to cash in their stars for a special baking session with your or a scheduled picnic with a loved one.

If you’re finding that the token system approach stops working for your child after a period of time, and you’ve already tried adjusting the number of stars down, that could mean that the rewards you are offering are no longer functional. Here are some additional ideas for reinforcers that can last across multiple star chart completions:

• Advent calendars: who says these are just for the month of December? Advent calendars are available year-round on Amazon, and today the options go far beyond chocolate. For example, LEGO, Hot Wheels, and Funko all make advent calendars annually and the overstock can be purchased after the holidays are over. Advent calendars provide you with 24 miniature rewards – and the fun of opening them – to use as available cash-in prizes for your child’s star chart. You also have the added fun of getting to skip around and choose numbers out of order.
• Figure set toys: again, figure set toys are available in a range of themes and characters, from a range of manufacturers and sellers – online or in-store. Figure sets contain anywhere from six to twenty figures in one set, which you can award your child one at a time each time they complete a star chart, until they’ve earned the complete set.
• Science experiment kits: science experiment kits are a popular gift, but they’re often over all too quickly. Once the box has been open and the goo has been made or the volcano has exploded, what then? These kits are a bit hard to maximize bang for buck when used in the traditional fashion. But when used as part of a reinforcement system, you can make the anticipation part of the fun. Offer your child the option to earn one piece of the kit for each star chart they cash in. Then, when they’ve earned each kit component, you can do the experiment together, and it will be that much more memorable.

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA Courtney is a behavior analyst, educator, and writer in the Pacific Northwest. She has over fifteen years of experience in the field of autism services, and over ten years of master’s level experience in classroom teaching and ABA therapy. Her areas of expertise include infant and toddler development, parent coaching, ABA clinical leadership and training, P-12 special education, and case consultation for children and young adults with autism and other special needs. Courtney lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.

As a special educator, part of my job is to ensure children with autism can access school activities and lessons in a way that is meaningful for them. This is different than creating individualized instructional plans and programs, because it involves taking something that already exists and adjusting it in some way – rather than creating something brand new. And, this way of specialized teaching applies to social-emotional learning, too.

There are two main ways of altering educational material and methods to accomplish this goal: accommodations and modifications. The line between these two things often becomes blurry for parents, and the truth is that it can be blurry in practice for educators and other school professionals as well. But it is important to understand the distinction between the two, as well as what they each entail, in order to ask for and utilize them successfully.

In this article, we’ll define accommodations and modifications in a way that is easy to understand and remember. We’ll also give some common examples of accommodations and modifications in an educational setting, and discuss ways to advocate for them appropriately.

Why Do Accommodations and Modifications Matter?

To understand why accommodations and modifications matter, it’s first important to understand the context in which they are typically used. In K-12 educational settings, a tiered or circular approach is often used to gradually increase supports and individualization for students who need extra or specialized support at school. This may be referred to as Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS).

This means that all students are provided with a robust, high quality educational environment – including the physical space, the curriculum, and the teaching staff – as their foundation for learning. That’s the first tier. Then, at the second tier, students who need some extra support for specific academic or social and behavioral needs can access that as naturalistically as possible in their classroom or in small groups. This is where accommodations and modifications are applied most frequently. But, that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful and even critical in the third tier as well. The third tier is highly supported, individualized education services tailored to the intensive needs of the child.

What Are Modifications?

It will be easier to understand what accommodations are if we first explain modifications. Modifications are what they sound like: changes to an existing lesson, in order to make it more accessible. For example, a modification for a sheet of math problems could be to shorten the amount of problems assigned, or highlight only the ones relevant to the facts the student currently knows by heart. Text could be modified by making the font larger or increasing the space between words. Visual guides might help the student to focus on what they are reading, such as a ruler used under each line of text as it is read to ease efforts to visually track and block out excess visual stimulation or distractions on the page.

Modifications can be relatively easy to implement “on the fly.” This means that a teacher might notice a student is struggling with an assignment in the moment, and make an adjustment right then – even if they didn’t pre-plan to modify the assignment. In this type of situation the teacher is looking to ensure the student accesses the content without having to complete every single practice opportunity, or to assess their mastery of a concept without completing every test item. The teacher will use their educational judgment to note whether the student can move on at pace with the rest of the class with continuing modifications, or if they will need additional time with the material to master it.

Remember, modifications take what is already there and adjust it based on the student’s unique needs or tolerance and endurance – but the content itself remains the same.

What Are Accommodations?

Accommodations, on the other hand, take what is already there and tackle it in a different way. The assignment is replaced with a different assignment altogether. Accommodations are particularly useful when the student is working within the same learning environment as their peers, and with the same subject matter to a certain extent, but have a different learning style. For example, a nonverbal student learning about community helpers alongside their peers who are doing an activity to verbally identify pictures of police officers, firefighters, and other community helpers during a class meeting might do a picture-to-picture or word-to-picture matching activity instead of verbally saying the answers.

Accommodations could also adjust the subject matter within an overall scope and sequence, to a certain extent. For example, a student who is working on single digit addition while the majority of the class is working on double digit addition could receive a worksheet with single digit addition problems during class work time, while still participating in the mathematics lesson at large with the rest of the class. The teacher could even plan ahead to include some single digit practice in the lecture or group practice section of the lesson, utilizing those as review for students who have already mastered the skill but as group instruction opportunities for the student who is currently working on that skill.

In my experience, accommodations are a lot harder to do “on the fly” than modifications. This is because they require some type of preplanning to identify what content the student is working on and what type of accommodation they will benefit from, as well as how to integrate it with what the class as a whole is doing on a daily basis in their lessons. Because of this, accommodations might be best applied when identified in advance and planned for unit by unit, instead of day by day. Then, the teacher can monitor the student’s response in the moment and make further adjustments from there as needed.

How to Ask for Accommodations and Modifications

If you think your child would benefit from more or different accommodations and modifications than what they are currently receiving in their educational environment, it’s still a good idea to start with inventorying their current menu. This is because when accommodations and modifications are being done well, they often blend into the background of what is happening on a daily basis at school.

A good way to start the conversation is to ask your child’s teacher something along the lines of: can you share with me what accommodations and modifications my child is currently benefiting from, both academically for each subject area, and also socially and behaviorally?

Once you’ve got an outline of what’s happening and what your child is responding to most successfully, you can craft your requests accordingly. For example, if your child’s teacher shares with you that during reading time your child gets more frequent breaks between work tasks so they can engage successfully with the material and not get too tired or bored, you might ask for a similar modification during less structured times of the day when they are struggling to maintain positive interactions with peers for the entirety of lunch, or the entirety of recess. Or, if you have concerns about your child’s ability to understand more abstract concepts like the structure of the U.S. government, you might ask for accommodated material addressing other beginning civics concepts like creating rules, reaching consensus, and following rules.

Finally, if your child has an IEP (Individualized Education Plan), there is a specific section in which accommodations and modifications will be listed. However, these are often listed in boilerplate language, so they will need to be interpreted and applied with specific attention to your child’s needs and their learning contexts at school.

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA Courtney is a behavior analyst, educator, and writer in the Pacific Northwest. She has over fifteen years of experience in the field of autism services, and over ten years of master’s level experience in classroom teaching and ABA therapy. Her areas of expertise include infant and toddler development, parent coaching, ABA clinical leadership and training, P-12 special education, and case consultation for children and young adults with autism and other special needs. Courtney lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.

All kids need help to learn critical social emotional skills. That’s how they form a foundation to successfully interact with others, accomplish collaborative projects, and participate on a team. Children begin practicing early social emotional skills as infants. Crying to get a need met, accepting comfort after getting hurt, and imitating a sound or action are all beginning skills on the way to more complex social emotional understanding and behaviors later in life.

Once babies progress beyond these early methods of communicating their emotions and exploring social relationships, they become children who need a lot of help to figure out social emotional expectations and act accordingly. They experience feelings and emotions that are as intense as you or I do, but they don’t yet have a way to think about and express them with nearly the same sophistication.

The first step on the road to a vibrant repertoire of social emotional behaviors and skills is to learn and practice social emotional awareness. Social emotional awareness is the ability to identify one’s thoughts and feelings, as well as identify indicators of feelings and emotions in others. When social emotional awareness is established, children can then begin learning how to manage their own emotions and interact successfully with others in a range of social situations, from playdates to group projects in school.

Children with autism may need extra guidance and teaching to successfully acquire and generalize social emotional awareness. They might need more opportunities to practice naming and expressing feelings and emotions. This is something that you can do at home, in your community, and when visiting or traveling to new environments. 

Here’s how to teach social emotional awareness to your child with autism.

Start With Them

Your child’s own emotions are a great starting point for teaching awareness, as they are intimately familiar with them. For example, your child may do things like jump up and down or nod their head when they are happy. Or, they could fall to the floor or stomp their feet when they are sad or mad. These nonverbal indicators of emotions give you an opportunity to talk about emotions as they are experienced. This provides context for your child to learn how to tell the difference between what they feel across different experiences. 

Use Easy Words

Starting with simple emotion words like happy, sad, mad, and excited makes it easier for your child to make the connection between a range of experiences that all produce a similar emotion. For example, you could use the word “excited” to describe your child’s emotions when they get to have their favorite cereal at breakfast, when you get home from work, and when their favorite book is picked for the bedtime story. Of course, you want to use many emotion words over time to increase your child’s social emotional literacy, and help them know what to do across a wide range of situations that produce complex emotions. To do this, you could pick one or two new emotion words to introduce each week, in addition to the basic, universal words you use all the time. 

Teach Expression

Part of social emotional awareness is learning how to communicate emotions. This communication doesn’t have to be verbal. You can start teaching nonverbal expression of emotions early. A good starting place is the “If You’re Happy And You Know It” song. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that the expressions you choose are age appropriate in a range of situations. For example, stomping one’s feet when mad is OK for a toddler or very small child, but squeezing a stuffed animal or pillow may be more appropriate for preschoolers and kindergarteners. You can also teach expressions that involve a social component, to lay the foundation for social skill development later. For example, teach giving a high five as an expression of feeling proud. 

Say Complicated Things For Them

Your child will often feel big emotions that are too complex for them to articulate, especially in the moment. This could happen when they are feeling happy and excited – or overstimulated – as well as when they feel frustrated or disappointed. During these situations, it is a good idea to get down on your child’s level and explain what you see happening. For example, you could say: “I saw that you got skipped over for the circle time activity. It’s so disappointing when you don’t get a turn. Sometimes we don’t have control over what happens to our turn in a large group. That would make me feel sad, too.”

Paying attention to complex social situations and their impact on your child, and then giving them the words to describe the situation and feelings is a good way to help them build awareness. You don’t have to fix the problem in the moment, if it can’t be fixed – the teachable moment can be about noticing and describing feelings and emotions that environmental factors produce. Also, this lets your child know they’re not isolated in their feelings. 

Use Books

Today, there are many books for children specifically designed to teach social emotional awareness. These books help families learn about and begin to practice emotion regulation skills, in addition to showing common scenarios that produce emotions your child is likely to feel. These books also plant the seeds for learning social skills, like conflict resolution through demonstrating sharing. If you type “social emotional learning” into your Amazon search box, and filter for Children’s Books, you’ll find lots of books like this.

You can also use books that are not specifically designed to teach social emotional awareness and skills. For example, the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems provides lots of opportunities to pause and name feelings and emotions the characters are having during the course of the book. As your child gets older, you can talk about what the characters did to identify and express their emotions, as well as solve problems when they occurred. Talk about other solutions they could have used, as well.

Let Unhappy Emotions Be OK

As a parent, you naturally want to solve problems for your child, and make them feel better when they are frustrated or sad. You could place all of your effort into trying to eliminate the cause of their disappointment. However, it’s important to be intentional in letting your child feel their emotions and letting them know that’s OK, too. Sometimes it will not be possible to make the source of unhappy emotions go away. By allowing room for these feelings and validating them, you’ll help your child build resilience so they can stay calm and regulate intense emotions as they get older.

Talk About Your Own Emotions

Parents often screen what they say and do around their child, and this is positive to a certain extent. You want your child to trust that you can help them navigate situations that are uncertain or uncomfortable for them. You also want to be thoughtful in what emotions you demonstrate in front of your child and what social situations you will talk about with them, being mindful of what is age appropriate.

However, don’t eliminate discussion of your own social experiences and emotions from your vocabulary around your child entirely. It’s important that they see and hear you experiencing a range of emotions so that they can learn from your model. For example, if you knock over a cup of milk before you have a chance to give it to them at breakfast, you could take a breath, then say calmly, “this is so frustrating! I was all ready to give this to you, and it surprised me when I knocked it over. Now I have more work to do. And I’m worried we will be late. But I am going to take a deep breath, clean this up, and get you some more milk. I know within a few hours, this won’t bother me at all anymore.”

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA

Courtney Gutierrez, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA Courtney is a behavior analyst, educator, and writer in the Pacific Northwest. She has over fifteen years of experience in the field of autism services, and over ten years of master’s level experience in classroom teaching and ABA therapy. Her areas of expertise include infant and toddler development, parent coaching, ABA clinical leadership and training, P-12 special education, and case consultation for children and young adults with autism and other special needs. Courtney lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.