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I had an autisic student in my room with a one-on-one paraprofessional. Students were being quizzed on classifying the instruments into their proper families. All students had a "fill in the blank" quiz with the picture of the instrument and a blank next to it to write in the family name. For my student with autism, I had cut outs of the instruments and he had to place them onto the color coded instrument family paper. (Purple was strings, blue was brass, green was woodwind, and red was percussion. These were the color codes we used all year.)

In the past, I have made adaptions to the melodic notation assessment that I use. When students have specific learning disabilities, they may have difficulty drawing note heads on the staff. In the past, I have allowed students to use manipulatives to notate what they heard. I have also reduced the number of pitches in each example and provided boxes on the staff (like bar lines between each note head) to help students compartmentalize the notation for the first pitch, the second pitch, the third pitch, etc. In terms of testing accommodations, I have tested students one-on-one (flexible setting), played the melodic phrases as many times as the student needed, and allowed for extra time.

One strategy that I can improve upon is providing students more opportunities for self-evaluation at reflection. I believe that after every performance/activity/task is it helpful to celebrate one thing that went well and to identify an area for improvement. Rather than telling students what they did well and how they can improve, I would like to offer more opportunities for the students themselves to reflect on their progress.

In addition, I can increase my use of graphic organizers in the classroom. Graphic organizers provide a visual way to organize important content. They are especially effective when students complete the graphic organizers. The increased use of graphic organizers might help students process and remember key ideas. This could be true for visual learners, as well as students with special needs.

In a fourth grade music class, I have four mainstreamed ESE boys, two with autism. They like coming to music and the other students in the class are encouraging and helpful to them. Students are learning to play the recorder and are now playing five-note songs. One thing I do to help all students is to color code the notes and display the songs on large chart paper. This week's new note was orange D. Students were asked to only play the new note D as I sang and pointed to each note in the song. Next, I divided the class into groups, assigning each group a specific note in the song to play. After playing the song, I reassigned each group a different note. Lastly, students played all the notes as I pointed to each note on the chart. One autistic student used to get very frustrated. I believe this strategy is helping him and I see him gaining confidence in his ability to play a song successfully.

Several years ago I taught a student with autism. He was easily overstimulated by the sounds in the elementary music classroom and our many movement activities. It was not unusual for him to make loud noises and hide under the furniture when he could not handle the stimuli. His teacher gave him noise cancelling headphones for music class. In addition, I gave him a special place at the far corner of the music class where he could go if he needed to get away from the noise or movement. In addition, I featured this student during singing activities. He loved to sing -- especially into a microphone -- and he matched pitch very well. The class and I celebrated his strengths in music class, as well as allowed him to modify his participation in certain activities that overstimulated him.