Meredith Paul teaches special education at the Dahlberg Learning Center for toddlers aged 2-3 years old. There are 9 children in her classroom, which also has two other teachers and a foster grandparent. The children work on goals like using receptive language to request items. Meredith completed a behavior plan for a student named Abby from another classroom who frequently screamed. Her new behavior plan focused on giving Abby rewards for communicating her wants to a teacher instead of screaming, which reduced Abby's average daily screams from 27 to 1.8.

1. My name is Meredith Paul and I
teach special education at
Dahlberg learning center.

2. • The children in my classroom are
toddlers.
• The ages are 2-3 years old

3. • There are nine children in my class.
• Yahia, Zachary, Nomi, Rashad, Azariah, Micaela, Jajuan,
Johans, and Zamonte.

4. There are two other teachers that I
teach with, Sue and Ann. Joyce is
the foster grandparent in the room

5. • The children in the classroom have goals that they work
on.
• We repeat for the children what they want.
• We tell the children who wants a bowl and the child
repeats after us, “I want a bowl please”.
• We say who wants a plate, the child says “I want plate
please.
• It is receptive language by repeating what do you want.
• This is a picture of Nomi
and one of her goals is to wear her
glasses

6. • This is Micaela she is doing one of her goals, sitting with
her legs out in front of her
• This is Johan's he is doing one of his goals, the pincher
grasp. Johan’s is holding a straw with his fingers

7. • This is a picture of Micaela and she is working on one of
her goals, the pincher grasp and she is holding a straw.

8. One thing that I did at school was, I had to do a
behavior plan on a child.
The child that I did my behavior plan on her name is
Abby and she was from a different classroom.

9. • Abby is a two and a half year old girl.
• What is her challenging Behavior? Screaming
• Before when she screamed? She got a “timeout”.
If Abby screamed at a friend or a teacher she
received a “timeout”, and she was not allowed
access to the treasure box.

10. • Every other child in the class has been able to get
“treasures” from the treasure box, more frequently than
Abby.
• Some of the toys that are in the treasure box are:
Crayons, markers, coloring books, books, magazines,
stickers, little bouncy balls, bracelets, cars, trucks, candy,
and slinkies

11. • After I observed Abby I had to do a
functional behavior assessment.
• FBA

12. • ABC: While I was observing Abby I noticed that she was
screaming a lot. Most of her screaming would occur at
breakfast time, during a group activity and during gross
motor time.
• Baseline: I observed Abby for these 3 periods (totaling 75
minutes per day) for 5 consecutive school days
• Then I had to graph Abby’s screams

13. The range is from 24-41. The mean is 27
over 75 minutes per day.
Baseline data collection: Abby, 2 years old.
Screaming
45
40
35
30
Frequency
25
20
15
10
5
0
Monday 10-24 Tuesday 10-25 Wednesday 10- Thursday 10-27 Friday 10-28
17 26
Days

14. When Abby wants someone else’s toy, when a friend gets too
close to her, when she is redirected by a teacher, when
someone wants to share her toy, or when she is in “timeout”
she screams, which is followed by her being sent to a time out
chair. No change in her screaming was observed in response
to the timeout. Also, because she was frequently screaming
and receiving timeouts, she was generally the only one in the
class not allowed to get a treasure from the treasure box.

15. • Now if she screams, the new plan will be to let her
scream without having to go to timeout, but to remind her
to go to a teacher for help. When she has stopped
screaming, she is to go to a teacher and use her words to
tell what she wants. If she does that, she gets a treasure.
• Therefore there are now two ways for her to get a
treasure:
• 1. Go directly to the teacher instead of screaming
• 2. Go to the teacher after screaming

16. • Abby has been going directly to a teacher for help with
out screaming.
• My original goal was to reduce her screaming for an
average of 14 screams in 75 minutes to an average of 7
screams in 75 minutes, which would be a 50% reduction
in screaming.
• My actual results was that her screaming was reduced to
an average of 1.8 screams per 75 minutes or an 87%
reduction.
• Abby is improving but I will continue this plan to try and
reduce her screaming even further to zero.

17. • http://addohio.org/ This is The Add website.
Add helps adults and children with developmental
disabilities.
Dahlberg learning center is apart of the Add community.