Your Special Chef

A lot of special needs bloggers have shared this resource and I want to pass it along as well.

Your Special Chef is a great website designed as a Gold Award Girl Scout Project by the Anna Moyer, the sister of a young man with Down Syndrome.  (As a Gold Award Girl Scout myself hats off to Anna Moyer!)  The site has lots of great resources including picture recipes, articles about adapted cooking tools and You Tube videos of adapted cooking in action.

Check it out!

Homemade Conversation Hearts

Ever thought about making homemade conversation hearts?

The recipe can be found at Make Monthly and a great photo version of the recipe is at About.com.  On day one prepare the dough using your switches with the mixer and our cooking communication pages.  This is a fun activity that reinforced requesting a turn, fine motor skills, following directions and switch use. Then let every student have a ball of dough on some parchment paper to knead. Once the dough is formed each student smells the bottles of extract (try lemon, orange, root beer, strawberry and mint) and chooses one to use.  Each student is responsible for making one flavor of dough, coloring it with food dye, rolling it out and cutting out the hearts with a cookie cutter.  What a wonderful multi-sensory experience with feeling the sugar and dough, see the colors, hearing the mixer and smelling the extracts!

Once the hearts are done set them out to dry.  The next morning give students were given a selection of 12 picture symbols showing messages that could be written by their adult partner on the candies (love, friends, sweetheart, you're icky, text me...).  Students also have a choice of five colored food dye markers to write their messages.  This portion of making conversation hearts is all about choice making!

Have fun!

Wordless Wednesday - Juicing for Key Lime Pie

The student is accessing a wobble switch at mid-line on her wheelchair tray to activate the Wireless Jelly Bean Switch, which is plugged into the Power Link environmental control unit, which is controlling the power to the juicer. The teacher is pressing the lime onto the juicer. In the end we juiced one cup worth of lime juice!

Cooking Class

On Friday mornings our class has cooking. Here is how we run our lesson:

1. We gather around a large group table and discuss the recipe of the week and how it ties into the theme. This works on recall of past events.

2. Students are asked what we need to do before we cook and then we all wash our hands. This reviews basic hygiene and following a sequence.

3. Students volunteer to gather materials for the recipe. They volunteer by using their voice, voice out put switch, AAC device or raising their hand. This allows students to work on calling for attention and using a communication switch or device.

4. Each student is given a card (see photo of cards above) for an ingredient or other item we need for the recipe. (Staff know that the half closest to the ingredient table are to stay on the far side of the room after gathering their item until the other half of the table is finished to prevent a traffic jam.) Gathering items allows for meeting goals like ambulation/self-propulsion, matching a picture to an object, reach and grasp, exploring a new object placed on the wheelchair tray or decreasing tactile defensiveness.

5. Once back at the table we follow the recipe. There are two things we always try to include: some kind of switch activated appliance and something we can count like stirring or spreading. we use switches for the blender, food processor, grinder, mixer or battery operated flour sifter. Once we get one we will use them for our new pouring cup. Through the activity students use AAC to volunteer for turns and to comment and ask questions (well sometime, we are working on asking questions).

6. Finally we either wait for our recipe to cook and clean up OR we dig in!

By the way, thanks to my former student teacher SU for the "shopping for ingredients" idea!

Here are other things that can be done with laminated ingredients cards:

• match card to card for practice
• play memory
• play Go Fish
• play 20 Questions by having a student draw a card and having the other students ask yes/no questions (via AAC if needed) to guess what food it is (is it sweet? do you drink it? is it a snack food? do you have to cook it to eat it?)
  
• match card to item in grocery store
• match card to card to find out where to put an item (label cabinets/shelves/drawers with cards)
• sort into food groups/place on the food pyramid
• sort by type of packaging (bag, jar, box)
  
• sort into groups by how/where you pack in a grocery bag (freezer bag, on top of the bag, on the bottom of the bag, in a separate bag)
• sort by first letter (or if your students can do it, alphabetize)
• using a jig to make sets of ten (one to one correspondence and packaging skills)
  

Don't forget that cutting out ingredient cards, laminating and cutting out again and hole punching as well as attaching to the split ring for storage (if you decide to store them that way) can all be vocational skills!

Another Way to Switch Adapt Cooking

We have all adapted cooking lessons by putting recipes or other related messages on a sequential voice output switch, using a power adapter (PowerLink) and switch to control a blender, mixer or food processor and many of us have also tried out an adaptive pouring cup.

In the past few weeks we have been trying out another fabulous cooking adaption. A $14.00 battery operated flour sifter adapted with an off the shelf battery adapter and a switch we already had. The result, lots of flour sifting fun!

Classroom staff are already planning to use it to make powered sugar designs on cakes and things in the future and it may fit in well to make it "snow" in our "tundra" dioramas for this month's Unique Learning System unit.