Overview

Accessible Hope has designed a special learning platform with the purpose of serving the needs of our neurodivergent students, including those with Autism. This platform is called Accessible Learning. Accessible Learning is designed to challenge our students in the specific domains of learning and experience in which they need the most help. Accessible Learning uses a system of goals, short-term objectives, and individualized skill-development teaching plans to help them acquire specific skills and knowledge. The system integrates a number of tools that enable our teachers and therapists to track each student’s individual progress and adapt as they grow and change.

Accessible Learning platform is meant to be used in an instructional environment that consists of individual and group instruction and peer interaction, to give our students a healthy balance of teaching and learning. By bringing students together in a group, they can practice social interaction, group instruction, and collaborative activities. In addition, one-to-one direct teaching throughout the day gives them numerous opportunities to acquire new skills with a dedicated instructor. The Accessible Learning platform is a creative toolkit that facilitates a low-stress learning environment that facilitates the development of a community of learners, while retaining individualization based on each child’s strengths and needs. When students enroll in our Accessible Learning groups, they receive instruction and practice to learn many of the foundational skills and develop a broad knowledge base needed for success in school, at home, in the community, and beyond.

Purpose

The purpose of Accessible Learning is to nurture and challenge every student, including those with a broad range of abilities and needs. By immersing them in frequent and consistent opportunities to grow and thrive, students are provided instruction in a universal set of content domains that enable them to gain essential skills, experience, and knowledge; while fostering kindness and understanding toward themselves and others, and teaching the value of continual learning.

Curriculum

The Accessible Learning curriculum consists of a research- and evidence-based bank of specific programs to teach skills across a range of content domains that are delivered in the context of high-interest content area themes that rotate approximately every 3-6 weeks. Each theme contains activities, crafts, puzzles, games, toys, songs, movies, and classroom decor that are directly related to the topic of focus.

There are three overarching purposes of the Accessible Learning curriculum. These are defined below.

Kindness

Students will learn that a kind response is always possible; students are taught to demonstrate kindness across a broad range of situations and emotional states including those involving difficulty, opposition, and trial. They will be taught that caring for others creates a better world for everyone, and they will learn to seek and seize opportunities to help others through action and to willingly give to others a portion of their time, resources, and talents.

Understanding

Students will learn that every human being – including the student – is an individual person who has unique characteristics, hopes, desires, and struggles; each with a story, a family, and loved ones; and that each person is different and special. They will be taught to acknowledge what makes them different from others and to recognize that every person is infinitely valuable just as they are, but that every person, each with his or her own flaws, is capable of positive change.

Learning

Students will learn the value of continually learning and developing in character, knowledge, and wisdom throughout his or her lifetime. They will be taught to seek teachers, mentors, and friends to help them along the way. They will learn that every day is another opportunity to discover something new, and that learning never stops.

Domains

Accessible Learning model divides knowledge and skills into seven core domains, plus a Behavior and Caregiver domain. These are named and described below.

Receptive Language

Receptive Language refers to the capacity to process language by way of the senses (primarily visual and auditory.) This includes listening and reading, or interpreting pictures and other symbols. Receptive language skills begin to develop once a child learns that everything has a corresponding “placeholder” (usually a word or phrase.) When children acquire the concept of associating symbols with their “things,” they can begin to learn words and their meanings. Once children begin to understand language, they can also develop the ability to understand directions with multiple steps and to learn new skills and knowledge by listening and/or reading.

By age 5, most children possess a receptive vocabulary of around 10,000 words. By age 6, this tends to increase to around 20,000-24,000 words. While children with Autism tend to fall short of these targets for a number of reasons, most are capable of making quick gains with consistent, high-quality instruction.

Attention & Listening

Many children naturally learn to intentionally observe and attend to people and things in their environment. Initially, they learn that their parents and other adults are a means to access otherwise inaccessible aspects of the world such as food and comfort. Later, they learn that by listening and responding affirmatively to the requests of adults, good things are afforded them. Ultimately they learn that by interacting with others and focusing on the things and activities other people are interested in, their experience of life becomes richer and their sense of freedom is enhanced.

Some children do not readily learn these skills, however, many children with Autism do not naturally attend to people and other parts of their environments the way other children do, so they need to be taught the “how” and “what for” before they begin to do it reliably. Once they learn that attending to adults is a means to being safe and content, they can then begin to learn a variety of other things from their parents, teachers, and others.

Skills in this domain include physical imitation, matching, navigating an environment safely, following routines, attending to learning materials such as books and movies, engaging in work tasks to completion, and making transitions from one activity or place to another.

This domain also encapsulates many of the visual abilities that are requisite for learning myriad other skills, including visual form constancy (understanding that an object remains the same even when it is oriented differently or is presented in a new environment), visual figure ground (discriminating an object from its background), visual closure (identifying an object even when it is partially obscured); visual discrimination (the ability to observe differences between objects or images); and visual-spatial relations.

Expressive Language

Expressive Language skills typically develop after initial receptive language skills. Expressive language includes verbal imitation; making requests or demands; labeling and describing things, people, places, and activities; responding to questions; and engaging in conversation. Expressive language encapsulates a range of modalities including gestures, sign language, picture exchange, vocal speech, written communication, and augmentative and alternative speech devices.

Social / Emotional

The Social/Emotional domain consists of the universe of social skills that facilitate rewarding participation in family life, community, school, and other areas of life that involve interaction with other people. Social and emotional skills are also required for academic success because learning often occurs in relationships with teachers and other learners. Social/emotional skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, family structures, initiating and fostering relationships, and building and maintaining friendships.

• Examples: Greeting, farewells, answering social questions, manners, maintaining conversations, emotions, coping, self-regulation, expressing pain & sickness, helping, giving, working together to solve a problem, working together to accomplish a goal.

Adaptive / Life Skills

The Life Skills domain is the broadest domain in the Accessible Learning curriculum. It encapsulates many aspects of the student’s experience that often are not explicitly taught, but which are essential for experiencing a full, joyous life. These include health and hygiene, daily living/community skills, safety skills and safety awareness, and understanding time and place (e.g., calendar, weather, growing up, communities, and basic geography.)

• Health & Hygiene
• Washing hands, brushing teeth, grooming, toileting, selecting appropriate clothing, dressing, nutrition, fitness & exercise, body health, sickness and pain, diseases, reporting physical symptoms
• Daily Living Skills
• Household chores, food preparation and mealtime skills, cleaning, community skills (e.g., getting a haircut, going to the dentist, grocery shopping.)
• Safety
• Personal information, getting lost, emergency responses, kitchen safety including the stove, knives and forks, glass items; swimming, sharp objects, medication precautions, furniture, driving/riding in a car, crossing the street, walking at night.
• Time & Place
• Calendar, seasons, weather & climate, natural phenomena,
• Growing up, seasons of life
• Communities and cultures, geography, holidays

School Readiness

The Learning domain encapsulates the variety of requisite skills for participating in an instructional or educational environment such as the classroom or school. Learning skills are designed to build readiness for learning reading and math, and for acquiring knowledge and skills in other content areas. Learning skills include fine motor skills, matching, sorting and categorizing, puzzles and workbook activities, visual memory, visual sequencing, letters and numbers, basic phonics, and number concepts.

Creativity / Play

At Accessible Hope, we believe play is the work of a child. By learning to play both independently and with others, they develop an understanding of an enormous range of other knowledge and skill domains, including physics, fine and gross motor skills, cause and effect, building, routines, and problem-solving. By learning to play, they also develop the ability to manage leisure time in creative and appropriate ways, acquire interests and hobbies, and discover various sources of fun and enjoyment. Typically, children develop play skills in stages that include cause-and-effect play, parallel play with peers, cooperative play, collaborative and competitive play, and pretend and dramatic play.

Behavior

The majority of students who come to Accessible Hope have a history of engaging in problem behaviors such as aggression, tantrums, running away from adults, or self-injury. The Behavior domain consists of goals related to this. The overall objective of our Behavior goals is to (a) understand and acknowledge the underlying reason for the behavior, (b) set a fair and firm limit so the student is safe and kind, and (c) teach a new way to behave that meets the child’s needs in a safe and appropriate way. The objectives of Behavior goals are the reduction of maladaptive/problem behaviors and increases in appropriate behaviors to replace them.

Caregiver

We believe caregivers are the student’s primary therapists, and thus need to be equipped to facilitate their child’s growth and learning outside of the clinical therapy environment. When students enroll at Accessible Hope, parents and caregivers agree to participate in several aspects of the treatment process, including attending training meetings, tracking data at home, and learning to implement the child’s behavior intervention plan at home.