My Love for Clickers...

During grad school, I worked as a line therapist for the cutest little blonde haired, blue-eyed boy with Autism.  This experience taught me so many things all of which have helped me become the therapist I am today.  Through this job I learned how to manage student behaviors, new ways to model and teach concepts effectively, organizational techniques, data collection methods, and PATIENCE!  :)

The way we kept track of responses during certain tasks was via hand tally counters or what I like to call 'clickers.'  These clickers made is SUPER easy and fast to keep track of right vs. wrong responses.  I loved them so much that I bought some for my classroom!  

I use these clickers for all of my articulation/phonology sessions and they have been a huge help as I never even have to look down while I'm working with a student like I would with a pen and paper to keep tallies.  Makes things go much quicker.  When I work with a student, I bring my set of 2 clickers (attached to a keychain hook/clip- see image below).  The colored clicker always represents CORRECT responses and the chrome clicker always represents INCORRECT responses.  Stays consistent that way.  I also always hold them in the same hands so I don't have to look down.  So I always hold the colored clicker (correct responses) in my right hand and the chrome one (incorrect responses) in my left hand.

I have 3 sets of clickers (red/chrome, yellow/chrome, and green/chrome) in my room so I can work with multiple kids at once if needed, but usually I'm with my artic kids one-on-one because I use the 10 Minute Kids approach.  I try to schedule in a block of time where I can just go from classroom to classroom and pull the student for a quick 10 minute articulation drill in the hallway.  I use this approach for the kids who only have a few errors- nothing severe.

I refer to the numbers on my clickers as 'points' with my students and they get really excited to try and beat their previous number!  It's a great motivator.  After the session, I just write down their numbers on my sticky label and if I'm feeling really ambitious I calculate the percentage right away too!

So there it is.... I heart my clickers :)