Behavior Support

Quick Mask Tips

A Day With Your Mask

General Mask Tips

I Can Wear A Mask Read Along

Making Your Mask More Comfortable

Normalizing Wearing A Mask Through Play

Sensory Sensitivity With Masks

Teaching Your Child Tolerance Wearing A Face Mask

Tips For Decorating Your Mask

ABA ACADEMY

Helpful Proactive Strategies

Chunking

Setting Limits

Shaping

Verbal Praise

Visual Schedules

Desensitizing to Wearing a Face Mask | The Summit Center

Helping Your Child Wear a Face Mask | BCTOB

Teaching Your Child to Tolerate Wearing a Mask | Children's Respiratory & Critical Care

Tips to Support Mask-Wearing for Students with Disabilities | Maryland State Department of Education

Mask Tolerance Training

STEP 1: Find a Reinforcer

• Think of a highly reinforcing item, activity, or food item that your student loves.

• You will want to limit access to this reward and only provide it during tolerance trials. You do not want an item that they have free access to, or a reinforcement used often throughout the day, as this will decrease its value of it being highly reinforcing for mask tolerance trials.

• Provide specific praise paired with the reinforcement for completion of the tolerance trial. This might sound like:

"Good job wearing your mask for 5 minutes, I'm so proud of you for practicing staying safe! Here is the chocolate you earned!"

• Your student may benefit from having a fixed interval reinforcement schedule throughout the trial. This may look like your student earning an edible reinforcement every 5 minutes they keep their mask on for a total of 30 minutes, or whatever your current duration for mask tolerance is at.

• Your student may benefit from only receiving reinforcement at the end of the trial to avoid satiation. You know your student best and know if they will become satiated on a particular reinforcement if delivered too frequently during trials.

• You can use different reinforcement options for each trial that day, or switch it up every few days. The key is to find a highly preferred reinforcement that they do not have free access to or earn too frequently in other areas throughout the day.

STEP 2: Tolerance Trial Setup

• Try to do 10 trials of tolerating wearing a mask every day. If you can, take data on how many times your student is able to go the entire duration tolerating wearing their mask.

• You will want them to be able to tolerate wearing the mask for an average of 80% of the trials before increasing the duration you're requiring them to tolerate the mask.

• Make sure you have your student practice with multiple people to promote generalization.

• In general a duration will be "mastered" if they can tolerate wearing their mask for the set duration in 80% of trials, across various settings (you can practice in their room, in the kitchen, in the yard, etc), across various days and times, and with at least 2 people in all those settings.

• Once they are able to tolerate wearing a mask in and around your home, you can start practicing in the community for short periods of time.

STEP 3: Practice Makes Perfect

• You know your student best as far as what their current tolerance level is for wearing a mask. If you know your student won't even put on a mask, or will immediately take it off if you put it on, you may want to start with tolerating the mask for only 10 seconds and move up from there. If you know your student can tolerate it for a few minutes before taking it off, you might want to start with 5 minutes and move up from there. Make sure when you do decide to increase the duration of your trials that you are mindful of not adding too much time to where they will not be successful.

• If your student can understand an explanation of why they need to wear a mask, make sure to remind them every time you practice.This might sound like:

  • I know wearing a mask feels different. Everyone has to wear a mask when they go inside stores or when going back to school. We wear masks to keep ourselves and others safe from getting sick.

• There are many social stories and videos online that discuss Covid-19 and the need to wear a mask to keep yourself and others safe that you can watch and review with your student.

• Once you are ready to practice, start by having clear instructions. This may sound like:

  • "We are going to practice wearing our mask. Let's keep our mask on for 5 minutes. I'll set the timer. When the timer goes off you can take your mask off and get your chocolate."

• You may want to prime your student earlier in the day that you will be practicing later. You can model wearing a mask throughout the day to normalize this behavior.

• You can utilize fun timers with their favorite characters found on YouTube.

STEP 4: Delivering Reinforcement

• Once the timer goes off, verbally praise your student for doing a good job wearing their mask.

• They can now have the previously determined reinforcement item/activity.

• If you want to continue doing more trials, you can set a timer for the set time you want your student to have with their items. Once the timer goes off, you can repeat the trial.

10 Social Distancing Videos to Share as We Return to School | We Are Teachers

Top Tips for Successful Reintegration of Children with Autism | Starlight & Stories

Behavioral and Mental Health Distance Learning Resources

Social Thinking

Mind Beat

10+ Social Emotional Activities For Home

PROMPTING OF REPLACEMENT BEHAVIORS

We always want to make sure you're also including a way for your student to appropriately communicate their wants and needs to you. We have added to our suggested language for their replacement behaviors, so I included all of it here. Included also, are the visual cards we use for prompting at school.

ACCESS TO PREFERRED ITEMS/ACTIVITIES

COMMON GOALS

• Appropriately Requesting Access to Preferred Item/Activity

• Asking Clarifying Questions as to when Item/Activity Will Become Available

Prompts should be delivered when student is attempting to access preferred items and/or activities (ie. electronic devices, toys, etc.) without permission or at an inappropriate time.

Prompt - “Tell me/let me know what you need’’

Prompt - “Let’s ask (adult) when we can have item/activity”

ESCAPE

COMMON GOALS

• Appropriately Asking for a Break

• Appropriately Asking for Help

• Appropriately Asking for an Alternate Activity

Prompts should be delivered when student is engaging in off-task behavior, is escalated or non-compliant.

Prompt - Gesturing to a 'break' or 'I need help' card

Prompt - "Tell me, ‘I need a break' or 'I need help'"

Prompt - “Your body is telling me you need a break”

SENSORY

COMMON GOALS

• Appropriately Requesting Time to Engage in a Sensory-Stimulating Activity

Prompt should be delivered when student is engaging in sensory-seeking behaviors (i.e. stereotypic behaviors)

Prompt - “Your body is telling me you need a body break”

Prompt - “Tell me, “I need a break please”

Prompt - Showing sensory activity options and asking them to “pick one”

ATTENTION

COMMON GOALS

• Appropriately Requesting Attention from Others

• Asking Clarifying Questions as to when an Appropriate Time to Engage with Another Is

Prompt should be delivered when student is engaging in inappropriate attention-seeking behaviors.

Prompt - “Ask (family member) if you can talk/sit with them”

Prompt - “Raise your hand before calling out”

Prompt - “You can ask (family member) when you can talk to them”

5 Ways to Avoid an Epic Meltdown

Choice Making

Strategies for Effective Behavior Management

Task Presentation

Visual Chunking

Token Economy (Example 1)

Token Economy (Example 2)

Token Economy (Example 3)

What Is Visual Scheduling?

How to Use a Visual Schedule

My Learning Day Visual Schedule (PDF)

Visual Schedule (Example 1)

Visual Schedule (Example 2)

• Any of your student's tasks (even household chores or self-care routines) can be broken down into small, incremental steps.

• Creating a task analysis for each routine may be helpful. They can check off steps as they go, rather than having a daunting list

“Let’s brush your teeth! What’s the first step?”

“Time to do math from Ms. (teacher's name). The first step is to sit at the table. Good job! The second step is to get out your pencil. Great work!”

• Task analyses lend themselves well to the token economy you may be using. You can pre-determine how many steps must be completed in order to earn a token.

• A visual schedule is a broad to set up the whole day. At school, we reference their class schedule for this. It may be hard to anticipate everything you will do for the entire day, so this online sample may work well for the home setting.

If you don’t have a laminator and Velcro at home, you may use a printer to print out clip art.

If you do not have a printer, you can use small pieces of paper and tape and write the words on.