The next dollar up strategy teaches students how to make change and allows students to be more independent in the community. Find out how in this post.
Life Skills For Kids: A Guide To Teach Essential Life Skills To Kids Life demands everyone to be skillful, so you should be equipped with essential life skills to thrive in life. And the process of learning life skills should be started from early childhood. So here is the list of some essential life skills
Check out these tools to help you create meaningful literacy experiences and work on reading comprehension with your students in special ed.
Teaching your children and teens important life skills is easy with these affordable life skills curriculum and books
In my very first self-contained classroom, I was lucky enough to have an instructional kitchen attached to my classroom. Instead of only utilizing that spac ...
Are you lookg for ideas on what other adult transition classrooms look like when it comes to schedules and lesson plans? Check check out my class...
My students enjoy this grocery store activity. I don't recommend bombarding one grocery store with 30 kids though. Since there is a grocery store on every corner where I live we split the kids, aides and teachers up into smaller groups and go to a variety of grocery stores. Students may need help at first trying to find the product with the best price, but it's a great way to incorporate money into the lesson. This is also fun because at the end, after each group adds up their total, they can tell you which store had the better prices. It almost becomes a bit of a competition. Pick one up free at TpT. http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Grocery-Store-Hunt
Keeping morning meeting age-appropriate for older students can be challenging. Here are 6 ways to incorporate a variety of age-appropriate activities.
I love this new kitchen unit that I have created for my students! It is simple and very basic, focusing on six main kitchen appliances (oven, fridge, microwave, toaster, blender, and dishwasher). When teaching some of my students how to cook this year, I realized some did not know these items yet. And it's kinda hard to teach students who to use the microwave when they don't know what it is yet! :)
Printable play checks are a great resource for parents looking to teach their children about money and financial literacy. These play checks can be customized with the childs name, amount, and even a pretend bank name.
My students all arrive at different times in the morning, which makes it very difficult to teach a class before their breakfast is served. For the past 2 year I have been having the students write a morning message, since it can be done in their own time as they arrive. It contains the date, the weather, what we plan to do that day and than a note on what we will be doing tomorrow. I am not sure how much my students are really gaining from this, so I have decided to put together morning notebooks for next year. Now that I have started I see that this will be more work than I had anticipated. Each morning should start out with the students logging the weather and temperature than doing a worksheet/activity from the folder. Mondays they will have to log the weekly schedule into the monthly calendar which will be placed in the front of their folders. I hope to have a quarters worth of pages ready at a time. So far I am thinking, Mondays - newspaper skills, Wednesdays -morning warm up, (which I posted a week ago), and Fridays - money math. Now to fill in the other two days! I will be posting things as I create! Here is one on food storage. I tried to pick common grocery items that our kids would have knowledge of. Maybe Tuesdays will be food/health/nutrition? https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B8NVsf6Y1KIvMm9vZTFOdUxlN2c
Life Skills as High School Electives: Home Economics & Shop Class. Teaching your kids life skills is a great way to learn and earn high school credit!
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This is a matching activity for cooking terms and their definitions. It can be used as a simple worksheet or the answer key can be cut into strips and done in small groups as a matching activity. - ESL worksheets
These are 5 common beliefs that teachers and parents have about functional life skills program that they may not even realize.
We practice calling 911 many times during the year. My students LOVE acting out scenes of an emergency. They literally will lay on the floor and look unconscious while the "call" is happening. I have a student in my class who is verbal but very hard to understand. We practice just getting out one or two words (mom sick, dad hurt) and than answer yes or no to the dispatcher (me) questions. Here is a worksheet that can be used before role play. http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Life-Skills-Calling-911
Listen to this Special Ed Podcast with 15 great ideas for Functional Centers for students with Intellectual Disabilities and Autism in High School. Read more and subscribe today!
Interview a family member or a friend and get to know more about them. Then write down the information in this graphic organizer.
Worksheet on why we pay taxes. This worksheet gives examples of income taxes and state taxes. Sales tax is based on California taxes. I also only use a minimum of income taxes considering most of my students will never work. ...
This is a matching activity for cooking terms and their definitions. It can be used as a simple worksheet or the answer key can be cut into strips and done in small groups as a matching activity. - ESL worksheets
Make sure your children are prepared for adult life by teaching life skills. It's never too early to start and never too late to learn!
I have posted a few of my life skills worksheets in the past and have been selling them individually in my store for the past few months. I have now put quite a few of them together at a great discounted price! I also added a "Making an Appointment" worksheet that I put together yesterday. If you have already downloaded this item, please download it again to get the new worksheet. Update: "Asking for Help" worksheet added 1/29/13 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Life-Skills-Special-Education-Binder
A one page worksheet on being sick. What is an illness or a disease. Students must name sicknesses and diseases, symptoms of sickness, and answer questions about how to prevent sickness.
Last month our community trip was to go to a bowling alley. Before we went I wanted to make sure my students understood the basics of bowling as well as the social skills needed for bowling, so we had some fun during our resource class exploring these concepts. First, we went through a coloring book. This book has descriptions of different bowling terms (strike, spare, gutter ball) as well as concepts like waiting for friends and cheering for our friends. We went over this as a class and made it into a following directions activity as well (Such as color the pins red, color the shirt blue, etc). I also threw in some math concepts, such as this number matching 1-10 cut and paste activity. And also a money worksheet where students have to color in the amount of money needed to buy each item that you might find at the bowling alley. I'm sneaky hiding these math skills into fun bowling worksheets :) Then we had this social skills game that we used two different ways. To introduce I passed out the green cards to students. I then read the blue card and if the student thought their answer fit, they told me what their card said. After we went through the activity as a class, I had students work on these individually as a matching or memory-type of game. Of course we played some bowling Bingo too :) As for our actual bowling experience, it went great! I was a little nervous when some students would step just about over the line into the slippery lane, but luckily no one fell! Also, we were right by the center so when we had balls that were rolling way too slow we were able to walk up and grab them which was really helpful. And check out that high five. That was all natural (aka we didn't tell them to high five and I didn't stage it - which I do sometimes so I can use the picture as a teaching tool) and I am SO proud of that high five and he's proud of his strike! :) If you are interested in the learning materials we used, you can find these (and more) in this Bowling Unit in my TpT Store. Anyway, it was a great experience! Have you taken your students on a bowling trip? If not, you should really think about it! We had a blast!
This is a matching activity. Students match the name of the kitchen utensil to its picture. - ESL worksheets
This afternoon in class we worked on a worksheet about Recreation and Leisure. This is very important in the clientele I work with. Our hop...
Me: "Oh, let's look back over our work. I think we need to try to spell 'clover' again. Let's try it together."Kid:"UUUHHHHGGG. I already sounded it out and I spelled it right. C-L-O-V-R. See.. Clover,
Listening and following verbal or oral directions is an important skill that many students lack. You may relate to Charlie Brown's teacher after going over step-by-step directions. Students often hear the sound the teacher's voice is making, but fail to tune into the meaning of the words. When students aren't actively listening, they miss important information that can impact their academic AND behavior in the classroom. One way you can help your students practice active listening so they will follow directions is with a fun activity called Listen and Draw. Listen and Draw is a great activity to do with your class at the beginning of the year when you are teaching class procedures. Include these with your plans after breaks as a warmup plus a good reminder about practicing listening and following directions. Grab a free copy of FREE Listen & Draw - Following Directions Activity. Sources to make my blog post graphics can be found HERE. Click HERE to read my blog's disclosure statement.
If your classroom is anything like mine, we live and breathe by a schedule. That is not to say that we always stay exactly on schedule, but we always have one. Correction: We always have more tha…
Grab this free download of slides that will help you teach social skills and character development lessons with your SEL students in first grade.
A poster presentation at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting researchers reported on a small study using a digital tablet to record precise handwriting metrics of 12 boys with autism, 8 with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 12 controls. The tablet measured pen pressure, strokes, speed and precise letter formation while the children copied an eight-word phrase that uses every letter in the alphabet. Three experiments were conducted - copying letters from the phrase written, tracing the letters in the phrase as carefully as possible and tracing the letters as quickly as possible. The results showed the following differences in handwriting kinematics: children with autism and those with ADHD were faster but less accurate than controls at each task children with autism performed poorly on the copying and tracing task children in the ADHD group struggled with copying but traced as well as controls. in all three experiments the children with autism who were worst at reproducing the letters scored lowest on working memory sub-scores of an intelligence quotient test the ADHD group and the control group did not show an association between letter reproduction and working memory The researchers concluded that it is not only motor performance but higher cognitive centers as well that contributes to handwriting difficulties in children with autism. Reference: Hughes, V. Handwriting study points to motor, memory problems in autism. Retreived on 12/28/12 from Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative at http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/conference-news/2012/society-for-neuroscience-2012/handwriting-study-points-to-motor-memory-problems-in-autism. Check out Your Therapy Source for handwriting activities.
Money, money, money, money, monnnnnney... So most of my students probably won't have to pay bills, but who knows maybe some of them will. Even if they never pay a bill in their life I figure it's good to know what's going on - because someone in their life is paying for all the things they have. So with this activity, I expect that my students will know what a bill is, the things we have to pay for (electricity, phones, internet, etc), and that money is need to pay for things - all good concepts for better understanding life. And if they can actually learn how to pay a bill on their own, even better! So technically, I use this activity and worksheet in our math class, but we use a lot of reading skills as well, so it can totally be for language arts too. I give my students a bill - I don't simplify them at all but will highlight some of the key info for some students (you can find a variety of bills to use with a simple google search) - and the fun begins!! We go over this many times as a class and we look for basic information such as due date, amount due, account number, company name, and address. This worksheet has all these items listed so students can record them as they find them, as well as address an envelope (I know you don't actually have to address the envelope when paying a bill, but it's a good skill to have!) and write out a check. I also project this worksheet right onto my whiteboard so I can fill in the worksheet along with them. When writing a check I obviously have students sign their name...and one time I wrote "your name" on the signature line up on my whiteboard as an example. Can you see where this is going? :) Definitely had two students write "your name" on their paper...lol I love my students! And now for part 2 of this post: I saw this linky party at A Turn to Learn and HAD to join! The theme is funny things your students said this week. Well, since I didn't see any students these week (Christmas break, yay!!!), I'll share one of my favorites that happened last year: Student: Mrs. Holtrop, are you pregnant? Me: (shocked) Um, no. Why do you ask? Student: Well, uh, don't those things take about nine months and you've been married for... (student starts counting on his fingers) Me: Uhhh, that's not quite how it works. Student: Wait, but I thought that once you... Me: (Quickly interrupting) Nope and, um, what are you working on, oh yes let's work on math. :) Wish you could have been there. Head over to A Turn to Learn and link up - I love this idea for a linky party and will love to read what your students have said!
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Executive functioning skills are some of the most foundational elements for academic and social success. They are the skills that help us to plan, stay organized, pay attention to important information, use strategies to get us back on track when we veer off course, be flexible when things don't go
Resources, tips, and materials to help you, help children with autism
The objective of this worksheet is to get students to prepare for a job interview and act it out later on. In a previous lesson the students had to read an application letter and study its layout and its meaning. Then they had to work in pairs and re-write the contents of each bubble in the good order; this task took 25 minutes. The teacher helped them to check their answers. Finally they could imagine their own dialogue. It is most suited for fifteen-year-old students. The correction is given. - ESL worksheets
