Our Morning Group: A Photo Essay

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Web Site of the Day: The Every Day Life Project

This link brought to you by reader Jeannie from Lesley College and Seem Collaborative in Massachusetts.

The Every Day Life Project is a free, membership required, website designed to teach learners how to do life skills tasks in a failure free environment. Other parts of the website have lessons on math and money, computers and online literacy classes. Though not intended for intesive special needs many of the materials are appropriate or adaptable. It is about life skills, literacy and success. Here is what their web site says:

What is the Everyday Life Project?

The Everyday Life project uses interactive, situation-based lessons to teach functional literacy skills. This new approach to learning allows learners to apply their basic literacy skills to real-world situations so they can gain the confidence and skills to be successful.

Why Teach Functional Literacy?

The lack of literacy in the United States is a very real problem. 22% of people tested in the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) scored at the Basic level in document literacy, representing 44 million Americans that do not know how to apply their basic literacy skills to everyday life.

Individuals at the Basic level can read the texts they encounter; however, they may struggle to integrate and synthesize information, and perform quantitative tasks with multiple steps.

Our goal is to help these 44 million people reach the Intermediate level and obtain the skills they need to succeed.

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Teaching Dressing Skills

If you have ever written a task analysis of putting on a blouse or tying shoes you know how difficult a skill dressing can be. Dressing is particularly difficult for student with fine or gross motor issues, visual impairment and/or cognitive challenges (particularly if they relate to sequencing, short term memory or problem solving).

Fortunately there are some free resources out there to teach dressing skills. CanChild at McMaster University in Canada has a free PDF download of a booklet to aid in teaching dressing using backwards chaining. Polyxo.com has a text based social story about dressing. University of Michigan offers tips for parents you can print and hand out.

Disabled Children's Village has a guide to teach dressing primarily for those working in third world countries, but interesting information for all. Texas schools has a four page guide book for teaching dressing to those who are deafblind. The Scottish government has put out a chart that lists seven stages of dressing, the skills needed to learn the next stage and suggested ways to teach those skills.

Higher functioning students may need to learn more about dressing for the weather and dressing appropriately for different situations. Integrating Minnesota has a lesson plan for dressing for the weather as does Exploring the Enviroment and Loundon Schools. Integrating Minnesota has another lesson plan for selecting outfits.

Dressing for the Weather is an online or free download game featuring Lecky the Alien and comes with a worksheet and lesson plan to match. BBC Wales also has a dress for the weather online game with the character Bobinogs from their children's television series.

Many of our students will need dressing aids such as those shown here at Rehabmart.

Pre-school and primary aged children may benefit from using teaching tools such as button boards, dress up doll and other toys designed to teach dressing. On PBS Kids children can dress Caillou for the Weather.

Older students can benefit from more age appropriate activities that teach dressing, including naturally occurring opportunities and activities like dressing a scarecrow for the fall festival or dressing a mannequin for a pre-vocational activity. You can pick up piles of old clothes with all sorts of fasteners at Goodwill, The Salvation Army and other thrift shops. These clothes can then be used to teach dressing in a more age appropriate way.

Montessori dressing frames are another option to teach some dressing skills in a discrete trial or direct instruction manner. (Note: dressing frame prices can range from ten to fifty dollars each.) On-line Montessori Albums has a task analysis, lesson plan and alternative activities for each kind of dressing frame and Montessori World as a more simplified version with photos.

Resources for Cooking in the Special Needs Classroom

Sorry about taking yesterday off. My goal was to post M-F, but we may all need to settle for posts on five out of seven days a week instead.

Most special needs classrooms find cooking to be a fun activity that teaches sensory integration, math, science, social skills, reading and communication. There are many easy-to-find resources online for cooking with children, but harder to find are resources for cooking in the classroom for learners with special needs.

One resource is actually a compilation of links from the page of another teacher of learners with special needs. While I encourage you all to check out all of the information on this site the links on Cooking in the Classroom are particularly excellent as well as the seven downloads of picture recipes.

Other sites with picture or photograph recipes include: Visual Recipes, Healthy Recipes, Nellie Edge and Great Recipes for Kids (scroll down).

Another website to check out is Savory Palette, with their free download of a cookbook for those with visual impairments.

E-parent has an interesting and unique article on using a bread maker with students who have disabilities that is well worth a read and may find you hitting up Craigslist or Freecycle for a bread maker.

The University of Illinois has a free online program to make and print any picture recipe you want called Custom Picture Recipes. You will need to play around a bit, but the site is very cool and extremely useful.

If you need photographic images of foods to use in making your own recipes I strongly recommend StockFood.