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!

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!

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.

Our Morning Group: A Photo Essay

if reading in an RSS Reader you may need to click here to view show

Vote for Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs in the 2008 Weblog Awards. You can vote once a day, every day! (Until January 13th.)

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.