Functional teaching ideas for multi-needs special education, with a transition / life skills focus.
Don't you just love when you can get your students excited to work? :) My students were begging if they could do this task!
how to set up a coffee business in your school run by students with special needs
These visual recipes and worksheets make it easy to teach and practice cooking skills in the classroom! These breakfast recipes range from easy-to-do independently (cereal) to more-difficult, great class activities (pancakes). Included are recipes for: Oatmeal (microwave) Pancakes Eggs (in a mug - microwave) Toast (or bagels) Cereal Included with each recipe is: Visual Recipe: This one page visual recipe is great for visual learners Sequencing Worksheets: 1 worksheets = 3 levels. -1: Cut and paste both pictures and sentences -2: Partial cut and paste and draw/write the other half -3: Draw and write the recipe steps. Review / Quiz: 2 levels. 1: symbol supported 2: text' Looking for more recipes? Find my cooking recipes that also come with books here! ______________________________ Learn when I post new products and sales: ✯Click the green star that says "Follow Me" near the top of any page within my store and you will officially be a follower! Get connected! ✎ Follow me on facebook for lots of great ideas and sales!
Teaching the different between public and private is important for so many reasons for our students with special needs. When teaching these concepts, I first talk about the difference between public and private places. We come up with a list and sort those places accordingly using visuals of one person versus multiple people. I created this sort from a boardmaker template and uploaded here on Board Maker Online. After talking about places, we move on to talking about both public and private places AND behaviors. We talk about what behaviors are appropriate in each area. This book and additional resources are found for free from SET-BC here and are available in PDF or Boardmaker files. (update: direct link here - other link now takes you to search) I love cut and paste activities because not only do they reinforce the skills taught, but also incorporate fine motor skills...and it takes a little while to complete :) Here's the other Board Maker Online activity that includes both public and private places and behaviors. Plus, check out all of these other great activities for this topic on Board Maker Online. I think it's so important for students to realize that private behaviors aren't bad, but they just need to be done in private! Here's to hoping there is no more nose picking or inappropriate self stimulation in my PUBLIC classroom! :) If you are looking for something more detailed to use with your students, I found this resource here. It is very informative and I didn't feel the need to go that in depth, but completely understand how some students might need those specifics.
Looking for ways to teach students about places in the their community? These community resources are perfect for special education or early education classes.
Who is prepping more work boxes this summer? I just love getting new ideas, especially for our older life skill students! Christina Bailey, a transition life skill teacher, offered to share a bunch of her work boxes on my blog! Thank you Christina! Christina works with transition aged students (19-26 years old) with severe cognitive and/or health impairments. Her school serves students from multiple school districts within the county who learn best in an alternative placement. Are you ready? Here they are!! Putting together (or taking apart) flashlights. Bonus points if students can get the batteries in correctly and get the light to turn on! (Motivation!!) Ice cube tray and colored pebbles with tongs. I love the fine motor aspect added here. Marker packaging. I absolutely love this task and would be a great one to buy during back to school marker sales (especially on those really cheap markers you don't really want to use in your classroom!) Erasers on pencils. This has always been one of my favorite tasks! Silverware sorting. A must for every work task station, am I right? And a super easy and cheap one to put together. Silverware rolling / packaging. I love this task as it is perfect for vocational preparation. Putting together curlers. Ribbon threading around a wire basket. I never would have thought of this task! I love using the wire basket to thread the ribbon, and bet students would have fun with this task too. Sewing kit packaging. Packaging tasks like this are great! Tea candle sort. I love this age appropriate color sorting activity. Toiletry packaging. Wouldn't it be awesome to get donations of items like this and put together kits to give out to the homeless as a classroom service project? So, there you have it! Did you get some more good ideas? Happy task box prep! If you ever have anything you want to share, feel free to email me. I love being able to share your fantastic ideas with other special education teachers like yourself!
I am so excited to add these grocery store file folders to our collection. They work on a variety of skills with a fun real life application of shopping or working at a grocery store!
How to teach simple budgeting skills to let students know if they have enough money for purchase an item. Great for visual learners and special education classrooms.
Prepping special education materials can take forever, right?! Well, that is, until you learn some tricks or find a good Netflix show to binge while prepping! ;) Check out some of these sped prep hacks and see how you can make your prep time more productive!
Theater for kids with special needs? Yes! Check out these myths about theater in special education and hear why you should be incorporating theater with your students.
So many students with special needs are concerned with answering questions correctly. Do you have any of those in your classroom too? These daily questions are designed for students to practice answering questions errorlessly. I finally finished creating my daily questions for the year pack over Christmas break and absolutely LOVE how it turned out. It has already made my morning run smoother, and I love the added communication piece this brings to our morning meeting. Each day we have a new question on the board. I store these in a file folder and switch out the question each morning. Students answer the question based on the two choices during morning independent work. Many of my students use devices, so they are expected to prepare their answer on their device. Students can use the sample sentence under the question each day to help them write (and say) their answer. For my students who do not use devices (or who are super fast), I also give them a weekly worksheet for our daily questions that they keep in their morning binder. There are several worksheets based on student levels. One involves drawing a picture answering the question, another writing the answer, writing the answer using a complete sentence, and answering the question plus adding details. This semester I got a new students in my class because his behaviors were causing issues in the higher level class, and since my class is more individualized, we wanted to see how he would do with that. I have given this student the higher level journal and so far this part is going well! During our morning meeting, each student shares their answer and we move their picture under their answer choice, creating a graph of sorts. It is a great way to learn about everyone and also helps teach students that there isn't always a “right” answer, and that it is okay for your answer to be different than someone else’s. Types of Questions: 82 What do you like? Given 2 picture choices. These are all opinion questions and students should learn that it is okay if their answer is different than their classmate’s answers. We graph our answers so we can compare and see our similarities and differences. (There are also a few options toward the end with 3 choices!) 20 personal info Yes/No questions. I included these at the beginning of the Yes/No questions because I wanted their to be opportunities for students to learn that is okay to answer no sometimes! This questions will always have a clear answer and staff can work with students to make sure they are answering correctly. 78 Do you like ____? Yes/No questions. For many students, answering Yes/No questions can be difficult. Many students are conditioned to always say “yes” (or “no”). It is important for these opinion question, that staff responds positively to all choices as not to make a student think they answered incorrectly. What makes me even happier than using it in my classroom, is hearing how much others are loving this product as well! I love making things that not only help me, but help other teachers as well! Here's a couple of the comments from people who have purchased this packet on TpT. Pam H: "This pack is perfect for my classroom. My students are all nonverbal or very limited in verbal skills. This pack will help us work on communicating with one another. I'm also going to use some of the questions with my students receiving discrete trial instruction. Thanks for a fabulous product! Totally worth the money!!" Kandi G: "Love it! I've been looking for something exactly like this" Erika W: "Love using this with my special needs students. It works for my students with communication devices, but also for my verbal students. It helps with their sentence structure and speaking in front of a group. " Brittany M: "I absolutely love this for my FMD/MSD class. I have a wide age range and there is so much that I can do with this for all different levels. Thank you!" Watch a video preview of this product below. You can get the Daily Question pack in my TpT store which includes 180 questions with visuals plus four differentiated journal pages!! Want more? Grab the second pack of MORE Daily Questions too!
Looking for ways to teach students about places in the their community? These community resources are perfect for special education or early education classes.
One thing that I have noticed with my special needs students, especially those with autism and/or those who are limited or non-verbal, is that they are often looking for the right answer. It didn't matter if I was asking them what they wanted to do for break, they wanted to pick the 'right' answer. No matter what I said, they would look at me and nod their head as they pointing to their choice, hoping that they were right. How sad! I knew this meant we needed to stop having so many right/wrong activities in my class. I needed to teach my students how to give their opinions. Errorless Question of the Day: First I incorporated a question of the day, "What do you like?". Each question has visual answering options and there is no wrong answer. We do our question of the day first thing in the morning, which allows my students to complete their first academic activity errorlessly while giving them the support that they need. Once incorporating the daily questions, I noticed my students began to speak in sentences more often as they become so familiar with the "I like ____" structure of each sentence. The wait time to answer the question also significantly decreased as students become confident in their choices. Students were smiling and excited for their opportunity to share their opinions. Plus, I got to learn some really cool things about my students! Errorless Journal Writing: Journal writing is a wonderful open ended activity that many students participate in, and it's great because there are so many right answers...but what about when students can't write? Or don't have the vocabulary to express themselves? I realized I was limiting my students by not allowing them to express their thoughts in writing and only having them work on "wh" question activities. They have important things to say! So, errorless journals were born. These journals provided my students with sentence starters (which I had been doing for years) but also gave them options to use when completing those sentence starters so that they didn't have to guess on a right way to complete the sentences. Also, my students who had never been able to write because they couldn't read or trace? Well, I made a symbol supported level for them too! I can't even explain how wonderful the changes were that happened in my classroom after implementing these journals. Suddenly, journal writing was FUN! My students were excited for journal time and so proud of their work. My students who struggled with completing sentences were now doing it on their own. One of my students who had never done journals because she wasn't able to write, just giggled and giggled and wanted to show everyone her cut and paste symbol supported journal. Anyone worried that your students would become dependent on the options to complete their sentence starters? I'm not going to lie, I did too, but I saw multiple students get to the point where they were so confident with themselves that I was able to cover up those options and they did it all of their own! Other Errorless Activities: These errorless activities quickly became my favorite. Which is why you can find multiple daily question packs, journals for the entire year, and greeting cards, all designed to help students express themselves and give them the confidence they need and deserve. There are so many times that we have to correct our students and tell them that they are wrong (and that's not necessarily bad, we have to teach them and they have to learn) BUT, if we can create even just a few opportunities a day where all students can express themselves however they want and be successful without wondering, we will give our students more confidence. And with confidence, our students can do SO MUCH MORE! Here's one of my favorite quotes! I love it so much I made it into a sticker that you can grab here.
I have a couple of students who can get very loud when they are excited. This 5 point volume scale has been an extremely helpful tool to help those students regulate their volume. I have a large copy on my white board and smaller copies on two of my students' desks. I often redirect then to a level 3 voice. I found this awesome book on Board Maker Achieve that explains each of the volume levels and when they are appropriate to use. I edited it a little bit to add pictures and just changed a couple of the words. I love the book because it helps explain to the student the purpose of the voice chart. And of course I love the interactive pieces, you all know how much I love my adapted books! Download the book here and the visual here. Do you use these or similar visuals in your classroom? Join the conversation on Facebook about your favorite special education curriculum materials and get new ideas from everyone else! I'm trying to figure out what new materials to request for next year already.
Sometimes you have to practice grocery shopping without going to the store. Even though we can't always go to the store to practice, we will be practicing our grocery shopping skills, specifically shopping from a list, all year long!
Summer themed academic resources to help your special education students continue to learn and work on IEP goals throughout the summer months and during extended school year.
Job ideas for students in special education to do in the classroom and around school
You might remember a while back I asked for advice on what to use for a credit card swipe machine for my students to practice on and enter their PINs and you came up with a lot of great suggestions! One of those was this Zillionz ATM machine...but it was a little expensive! I think because it probably isn't sold in stores anymore. So I gave up on that decided to start asking stores if they had any old swipe machines they wanted to get rid of! LOL I asked once and then chickened out. I had just about given up when....I found this in our school store (where teachers/parents donate items for students to buy with their hard earned school bucks)! Yup, that's the same Zillionz machine that Sincerely, School Psychologist recommended on my facebook post! I think I begged one of my students to buy it for me for $4 of his "thunderbucks." That sounds a lot better than $139 :) Now, for how I use it in my classroom. We use the Banking for Non-readers curriculum and we have pretend debit cards that we use for practice. This machine turns on with any card inserted, so that was perfect because each student could use their own card! Whenever we got to a lesson that used the ATM machine (or depositing money into the bank or buying something with a debit card, etc), we used our ATM machine! Now for the PINs, since each of my students had created their own PIN, I was afraid this would be a challenge. However, I looked up the instructional manual online and found you can change the PIN by entering the current PIN, pressing enter twice and then entering the new PIN. So I would walk around like a crazy person dedicated teacher, and change the PIN for each student. Why, yes, I did memorize each one of my students' PINs, that's not weird, right?? As you can see, you can insert pretend money as well! I was also very excited about this feature (I may or may not have been jumping up and down with excitement as I was figuring all this out). The machine has no idea of the amount, but that's okay. I feel like this ATM has added a lot to our banking lessons. It seems so much more realistic, and I know that my students can enter their PINs and use a machine that is similar to a real ATM machine. Plus, it's a lot of fun to deposit money! (Withdrawing money just opens the drawer, but I have been known to load it with the correct amount they were withdrawing so that each student could withdrawal $20...) A huge downside to this ATM was the volume with no controls. It was LOUD. Seriously, all caps necessary, LOUD! My ears were ringing after playing with it for a while. So, I filled the volume holes with putty and taped purple plastic over it...and that at least helped a little bit. My students didn't seem to mind the noise anyway, so that's really all that matters! It definitely isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than my students sliding their debit cards in the air or on their paper and entering their PINs on a calculator... :) If you are looking for one to use in your classroom, this ATM looks like the same thing just in different colors, and is just under $30 (or this smaller ATM by the same company, a little different but under $8!). Do you use anything else to practice skills like this? I'd love to hear what you use!