My students need aprons and an oven for the cooking lessons that we hold twice a week in our classroom. Currently, we use a microwave, crock-pot and electric fry pan.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
My Autistic Support Students have domestic maintenance goals in their IEP's that address cooking, cleaning, and laundry tasks, but we only have a single stove in another classroom for all of the Special Education Department to share, and we have to disrupt them in order to utilize the kitchen area.
My students are kindergarten and first grade aged children with Autism, who attend a public school.
Some of the children are non-verbal, but not all. All of them LOVE cooking and follow picture recipes to create dishes that they get to share after cooking. The recipes are broken into single steps. We either draw pictures of the items, or we cut and paste photos of the ingredients to the recipe. In this manner, every student can follow the steps and complete the recipe with minimal adult assistance. However, after we mix, stir, and pan each recipe, we have to walk the pans down to a room on the other side of our building in order to bake or cook it. We have to disrupt the room that the oven is located in, so we cook far less than we would like so as to minimize the disruptions to the other class. Having our own stove would enable us to cook daily with the students, which would foster independence in our young students. That would be amazing !
My Project
The students in my class are all from a poverty stricken area. They are not financially advantaged. Many are in foster care. They do not have the same advantages as their same aged peers in suburban districts. Independence in the kitchen is something that these children CAN acquire! They love to cook, but are limited by the simple fact that there is only a single stove/oven available in our school for our entire 135-plus student special education population. Having an oven in our classroom for their daily use would mean independence and normalcy for children that society has mistreated and ignored for the most part. We will make baked goods from scratch, in addition to making pizzas and pasta dishes, vegetables and side dishes, meatloaf and pot roasts. The children in my class need to learn life skills like cooking and cleaning, so that they can have a meaningful existence outside of school, too.
Donations from DonorsChoose.org would help give the very deserving students in my classroom the independence to care for themselves.
Preparing and cooking for themselves is something that all of my students can learn to do, if only they have the resources to do so. Many students in my room are non-verbal. However, having the resources we are requesting from DonorsChoose.org would allow my students to gain the independence that all people have a right to: being able to cook and feed themselves!
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. Conklin and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.