April is almost here- do you have a product or materials in place to celebrate Autism Acceptance Month with your elementary class or school?

Here are 4 reasons why celebrating Autism Acceptance Month is important:

1. It teaches students about the difference between acceptance and awareness. 
2. It helps clear up any misconceptions or stigmas students might have about their classmates who are autistic
3. For autistic students, it transfers the burden of explaining their neurodiversity from them to the teacher
4. Even if you don’t have any students with autism in your class or school, your students will encounter someone one day who is autistic and they will have a neurodiverse-affirming lenz to interact with them. 

Here are some ways I organize Autism Acceptance Month at my school!

*If you’re wondering why in my school we celebrate Autism Acceptance and not Autism Awareness, check out the Autism Self Advocacy Network’s statement here.

Disclaimer- Super Important!

As educators, we can sometimes get so excited about an idea and rush into it full steam ahead to make it happen. That is an amazing attitude to have, and it probably makes you a fantastic, hard working teacher. But for this month in particular, you want to pause for a minute and check in with some people before moving forward. There are likely many students with autism in the gen-ed classrooms of your school. Depending on each individual student, they may or may not want to be celebrated this month. They might see it as someone ‘outing’ them or their parents might not want that to be misconstrued as the only part of their identity. If you have students with autism in your school, it is IMPERATIVE that you check with the parents and each child first before rolling this out. If a student in your school is okay with the celebrations but they don’t want to be the center of attention in their own classroom, then keep the celebrations general and school wide. We would never want to assume that being autistic is something that someone wants to share and celebrate – it is all up to the individual!

Get the Whole School Involved

When April is just around the corner, I send all the resources I plan to use to my building using a digital activity menu. This can be as simple as a word document with links, an email with attached PDF’s, or a PDF that organizes all the information for teachers in an easy, click-and-go way. 

There are several benefits of the activity menu for school-wide celebrations:

• Teachers who feel overwhelmed by the idea of celebrating a topic all month can pick and choose what they want to do based on their schedule and their learners’ needs. 
• If you’re the only accessible or special education teacher who works with kiddos with autism, you might get asked a million times if you have suggestions on activities to do with their whole class. The activity menu puts all your ideas in one easy to access place. 
• This is a resource you can use year after year,  making little tweaks as you go. This will save you time creating new ideas and coming up with something different each Autism Acceptance Month. 
• Some classrooms might not want to put such a heavy focus on the teaching about what autism is if there is a student in the class with a diagnosis and either them or the parents ask for less of a spotlight. 

Whatever you decide to use for an activity menu, make sure you are incorporating active links to different activities. There is no bigger deterrent than when a teacher wants to do one of your suggested activities but the links don’t work!

I would suggest that as part of sending out the activity menu, you include a variety of different types of activities. Some teachers don’t want anything to prep or print out – which is fair, we’re all SO busy! Make sure your activity menu has some of the following options:

• A read aloud, or link to a list of read alouds. I record one for the school and send the file to all the teachers- maybe ask your principal or the PE teacher or whoever is available to help!
• A craft that can be completed by all levels of students
• Some kind of writing project, with the option for flexibility for drawing or options for younger writers
• A ready-to-go presentation about autism and why we celebrate acceptance 

 

Craft Ideas

Here are some of the craft ideas I’ve done in the past that have been popular with our school:

• Complete an infinity sign with each student writing or drawing what makes them unique
• Have students draw different ways they can be a better friend to a student with autism
• After learning about sensory processing, have students redesign their classroom or another part of the school (cafeteria, etc.) that is sensory friendly
• Have students color in a picture of a brain and write or draw what makes their brain unique
• Use an informational coloring page that has facts about autism that students can process while they color in the images

One thing I like to do with crafts is ask the whole school to do one simple craft together. It is really powerful to have a wall of infinity signs celebrating the uniqueness of everyone in the school displayed somewhere in the building everyone will see. You can also do a class or grade-wide bulletin board or display if you go to a bigger school. 

Buddy Classrooms

This is sometimes a harder event to pull off, but if done well, it can be a really fun memory for students. Buddy Classrooms in our school just means an older and a younger class pair up to complete an activity. We have various times throughout the year where buddy classrooms complete a project (Read Across America day they read together, Inclusive Schools Week they do a kindness project together, etc). 

For Autism Acceptance Month, try having classrooms buddy together to do something off of the activity menu. Maybe the buddy classrooms can learn about autism together. Maybe they complete the infinity craft together. Maybe they brainstorm some ways to make school a more accepting place for students with autism, and complete a project related to that. One idea that could be really cool is if everyone brought in tennis balls, and the classes worked together to make the technology room chairs more sensory friendly! Buddy classrooms also provide an opportunity for older students to model expected behaviors and facilitate discussions that younger grades might need more help with – which is especially important for a topic like Autism Acceptance. 

Spirit Days

Another school wide celebration could include a week or several spirit days. Here are some ideas of Autism Acceptance Month spirit days:

• Everyone Wear Red
• Hats Off to Autism- wear your favorite hat
• Team Day- as a class or grade, wear the same color to show you’re all on the same team
• We are Comfy With Autism- wear PJ’s or sweats
• School Color Day
• Neurodiversity Day- wear tie dye to show how unique and different you are
• What’s Your Passion Day- come to school wearing something that represents what you are passionate about

Whether you choose a whole week or just a few days, make sure that you really educate the students about the theme of the day. What’s Your Passion Day celebrates the way autistic individuals tend to have very strong passions for things they are good at or enjoy. Neurodiversity might not be a word your students know- let them know why you are celebrating that every mind matters. 

Class Tour

This might be one of my favorite activities to do! As a substantially separate teacher, I often hear some pretty cringy responses when the other students in school try to describe what my classroom is. I often hear, “That’s where the bad kids go” or “That’s where you go if you’re not doing learning” or “Only the weird kids go there.” YIKES. The best way to combat this is a tour of the classroom and a quick walk through of all the amazing things that we have in our space!

As part of the activity menu I will invite other classrooms to schedule a tour in my classroom throughout the month of April. Even a 10 minute tour on the way to a special could be enough! I usually give the students a few minutes to take a look around and see all the cool sensory equipment we have and take it all in. Then I call them together and we go through the different sections of the classroom. 

I try to be really intentional about pointing out the things that are the same in their classroom, like our word wall and our calendar. I also make sure I point out the kinds of reading, math, and writing activities we work on and really emphasize that in this classroom we are learning and growing just like they are! Of course the things the kids really care to see are the swing and crash pad… but the difference in attitude and fear that usually happens is dramatic. I’ll have kids coming back throughout the rest of the year asking if they can take a turn on the swing- who am I to turn down a social skills opportunity!

Your Turn!

You don’t need a fancy PDF or to go out and buy a bunch of resources to make this work well. Maybe the first year, your goal is to organize a Wear Red day. If you want to step it up a bit, maybe organize a school-wide craft. Whatever you do, it is important to remind students and staff why you are celebrating. Awareness of autism is not enough- accepting our students and classmates for who they are makes our school and community a more inclusive place. 

If you don’t want to go through the work of creating your own resources, check out this Autism Acceptance Month bundle on my TPT store that will get you set up with everything you need to run a successful school wide celebration!