I have always believed that preschool and kindergarten teachers and therapists have an extremely important and under-appreciated job. They work with students at a time of great brain plasticity, but often before they have been diagnosed and given services. Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers often have one to three students in their class who will be diagnosed and given individualized services by third grade, but not during the current school year. These undiagnosed special needs students require behavioral support from the teacher, often get no official support from therapists, and require that the teacher simultaneously minimize learning disruptions to meet the needs of their entire class.
After becoming an occupational therapist and eventually getting an MS in Early Childhood Special Education and a Ph.D. in Marriage & Family Studies, I began to develop a program to help pre-school and kindergarten teachers and therapists work with students who have complex behavioral challenges. My job as Mental Health Coordinator & PTSD Program Coordinator at Head Start in Bridgeport, CT showed me that behavioral and sensory modulation interventions work well together. My work as a school occupational therapist convinced me that pre-school & kindergarten teachers were extremely gifted but needed quick practical behavioral guidance.
Since many gifted occupational therapists were already giving workshops to elementary school therapists, I began by giving workshops for preschool and kindergarten teachers. Soon, I found the need to add a few strategies to be developed by OT, PT, and speech/language pathologists that I designated in bold on the FAB Strategies form. I developed the FAB Strategies Pre-K & K Form and have been teaching it in my BER Workshops for Preschool & Kindergarten teachers and therapists.
During over 15 years providing workshops to teachers and therapists from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, the participants gave me a lot of helpful input for improving the form. My BER program developer gave me further input, as did my regular use of the form with young students in schools.
The FAB Pre-K & K form is useful to quickly develop a few helpful behavioral strategies for preschool and kindergarten students who are not yet diagnosed, that can be quickly implemented in a large class with a few quick suggestions from therapists. It is also helpful for mainstreaming young students with severe disabilities, assuring that all teachers and therapists are literally on the same page and using consistent interventions. Strategies are listed from left to right in developmental order to guide the level of strategy implementation.
For example, Section B row 6 begins on the left with beans and ends sequentially on the right with Shaving cream, X, and spine walk to gradually introduce more challenging textures to students who appeared to show tactile defensiveness. For students with tactile defensiveness the teacher or therapist would first try beans, playing with raw beans in a container that for most student’s is the least offensive touch and can teach form constancy as they put the beans in different shaped containers. If the child has no trouble handling beans the therapist would sequentially proceed to the right, gradually introducing increasing tactile challenges.
The final 3 are shaving cream, a difficult texture to tolerate that may require the use of the adaptation of using a popsicle stick to handle it. The final two inputs are slowly drawing a light X on the student’s back; then finally spine walk (sequential light touch alternately up the sides of the spine). These final two strategies are light touch and aversive, but can be alerting, introduce interoceptive affective touch in a non-threatening manner, and help teach body awareness and eventually spatial awareness of the back of their body, the class room and their paper.
I also developed a template that enables teachers and therapists to quickly provide a home program and suggestions for next years teachers and therapists. I usually begin by suggesting one or two strategies that I’m confident from my sessions will help the teacher or parent, and embed them in their daily routine FABPreKKTemplate. Once they are implementing and finding these strategies help achieve the student’s goal I add more. When the student progresses to their next grade or school I select at least one extremely affective behavioral strategy from each section (A, B, C, D) and e-mail it to the student’s next teacher and/or therapist.
I hope teachers and therapists find the Pre-K and Kindergarten form and template useful for developing strategies to help young children with complex behavioral challenges and sharing their best individualized strategies as home programs as well as with other teachers and therapists. My five new interoceptive awareness strategies will be described in my next post. All the other pre-k and kindergarten strategies are described and indexed in my FAB Strategies Book I hope the forms are helpful.
