"What do you do when publishers don't make educational materials for your students?
When pre-made games and activities cost $20 to $30 and may not be appropriate?
When your students need to practice skills over and over again in varied formats (kinesthetic, hands on, etc) to learn?
I am the freshman OCC prep and Math teacher at an occupational high school for students with mild cognitive impairments along with other disabilities.
Every day, working with this population, I have to address the questions above. In their high school courses, my students learn the skills they need to function in life outside of school; how to read and/or use menus, ads, recipes, coupons, timetables, money, directions on cleaning materials, recipes, etc. To learn and master specific skills in these areas, the students need to complete many different activities. For example, when learning to sort clothes before washing we not only read a text but also play a matching game with color words and pictures of clothes, sort ourselves into piles according to the color of our clothes, write or dictate paragraphs about sorting the clothes we wore that week and then, as a performance based assessment, sort piles of paper clothes.
My Project
I spend hours a week preparing for these activities-writing text, taking pictures of real world items, making manipulatives, and making educational games. The time I believe is well spent, but I would like to make items that can be used more than once a year. Many of my students have physical issues that cause pieces made out of regular paper to get wrecked by the end of the day.
Having card stock, which is a much heavier paper, along with contact paper to laminate the pieces would ensure I could use these activities for more than one day, one unit, even more than one year!
Please help my students get the instruction they need, all it takes is a few packs of card stock and two rolls of contact paper!
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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