My students need a button making machine so they can assemble school spirit buttons as a new vocational task and practice social skills as they take and deliver orders.
A breadth of vocational and social skills is paramount for transitioning students with multiple disabilities into successful, productive adults. My students want to learn button making as a vocational task, which will create social opportunities within our high school.
We are a high school class of students with multiple disabilities trying to learn, grow and plan for our future.
We feel there are a lot of myths about people with disabilities to button up.
We learn new skills every day, and can teach people a thing or two about hard work. We job train in the community and learn task completion in school. We grow as productive citizens, both in our school and our community. We plan for a full adult life; rich with family, friends and a sense of belonging in the great community we live in.
My Project
We would like to add a 3-inch button maker to our repertoire of tasks in our classroom. With a button maker and supplies for 100 buttons, we would learn a real world multiple step assembly task, order taking and delivering, and budgeting. Best of all, we would increase our interactions with the general student body through button making for sports, clubs, and school-wide activities. We will work with the art and technology students to create button images that express our school spirit.
Your generous donation will initially provide our class with vocational training that will promote school inclusion and involvement, but your gift will not stop there. By selling the buttons at school, we will be able to buy more button parts for making even more buttons. We hope to eventually raise enough money to buy matching work shirts for when we go into the community for job training.
Students in primarily self-contained classrooms at the high school level are often overlooked or their value to the school is discounted.
By making buttons for the school, we want to create a reason for the student body to seek us out and to interact with us. We want to be seen as a valuable asset within the school. We believe that by helping young adults understand and productively interact with us, we will make a difference in their lifelong perceptions of people with disabilities.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Martin and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
