Importance of Dramatic Play in the Learning Process

Dramatic play is such a vital part of a child's learning process.  Through dramatic play, young children up to students of all ages with special needs enhance their development in major areas such as language, social/emotional, cognitive, and physical skills.

Incorporating dramatic play into the school day can be as simply offering a play area that is open for children to actively initiate play with materials provided to spark their imagination, and it can be done by incorporating materials for dramatic play that correspond with lesson plans and themes.

Below are three of my newest products that work well to develop the major areas as listed above. Children learn to be social, follow direction, incorporate math skills, and learn valuable life and vocational skills as well.

These products work well for food theme, cooking, community service, etc...
Seafood Restaurant

Italian Restaurant

Mexican Restaurant

Reinforcement Tasks Used In Various Environments

Making tasks and activities to meet the needs of students of various age and ability is what I enjoy doing. I make products to reinforce learning in the early education, home school, and special need classrooms but never thought of uses beyond these settings until a customer of mine enlightened me.

I make a variety of tasks to include English language arts, functional curriculum, life skills and vocational skills. I found out that they are working well in rehab of a skilled nursing facility! I never really thought of this environment and the importance of the need for these types of tasks when working with speech and occupational therapy.

I will continue making tasks to meet needs in all of these environments and am now inspired to create things that will meet the needs of rehabilitation teams that work with guests individual needs.

Here is a sample of tasks that help with life skills including laundry, categorizing products, and meal presentation/food recognition:

Life Skill Bundle #4

PVC Pattern Task

One of the popular tasks in our classroom is our PVC Pattern Tasks.  I was recently asked if I could provide images of the patterns we use so I decided to make not only the images available but a list of the parts needed for each pattern.

These are fun patterns to put together and have various challenging levels. To provide the task for our classroom, I went to a local building supply store and told them what I was looking for and what the task was for and they gave me all parts for FREE!

All pipe and fittings are 1" with the pipe being cut down to size using pipe cutters.

PVC Patterns

Mastering a Skill and the Importance of Generalization

Many of us that work with students with special needs have our moment of excitement when we see a student master a skill, but to truly be excited is when we see them using this new skill in other areas of their learning and daily routines at school and home.

To help students maintain a new skill, teachers need to introduce the new skill in other ways along with varying the time of day. For example, if a student learns to master adding currency, have the student practice this skill by role playing a real situation...making purchases so they can practice their new skill.

It is also important to offer variety and to keep data so that you can track students progress.

Here is a FREE Data Collection sheet that I offer at my store that you can label and track your own students' tasks and progression.

If you are interested in a variety of tasks that work well with basic common core standards, life skills, and vocational skills, then I invite you to check out my store. I carry a variety of tasks to meet multiple needs like this one: Grocery Shopping with Coupons

Students learn savings using coupons, finding products to match lists, count out change, etc...

If student has not mastered all the concepts, keep a record using data sheet to record progress with each attempt of the task. This is a great life skill task that parents can reinforce at home to help their child learn shopping, finding prices, etc...

The important thing to remember is to not only teach students to master tasks but to also generalize it in order to maintain what they have learned.

Fun Spring Treat!

I am always in search of fun hands on ideas and tasty treats to go along with lessons and this one looks like a keeper!

Marshmallow Rainbow Kabobs


A great springtime lesson would be to talk about the weather changes and how much rainfall there is during this season. Of course storms are often times followed up with a beautiful rainbow. After lesson have the students build their own marshmallow rainbow for a tasty treat!

The visual above and instructions on how to make the kabobs can be accessed The Decorated Cookie blog.

*Tip-if you do not want to use the sugar suggested above you can use different flavors of jello. Place jello flavors in different sandwich bags for each color. Also provide a bowl of water for each jello flavor you are using. After coating the marshmallow in water, shake off the access water then place in baggie and shake. When you remove marshmallow from bag you might stain your fingers so you will want to use gloves during this process.

Valentine's Day Creations

What a fun week leading up to Valentine's Day!

In our life skills classroom we plan on doing some crafting and fixing a special lunch, with all students helping of course! There are so many wonderful TpT resources available to stay with the valentine theme. Here are pages of items to look through. Here is one of my FREE products for some Valentine's Day fun!

On Pinterest I found some very cute ideas as well that include the following:

http://thecraftingchicks.com/2014/01/extra-awesome-valentine-free-printable.html

http://www.modernparentsmessykids.com/2014/01/3-healthy-strawberry-snacks-for-valentines-day.html

http://3garlandgirls.blogspot.com/2013/02/happy-valentines-day.html

http://www.oneartsymama.com/2014/01/valentine-mailbox.html

For more great ideas from crafting to food, here is a great board of ideas from Pinterest.
 Valentine's Day Projects

Enjoy!!

PVC Pipe in the Classroom

I absolutely love to find and create multiple uses for products that some people think of as only what the product is intended for. One such product is PVC pipe and fittings.

PVC is one of the most popular products to use in the home for plumbing solutions but there are so many things you can create to benefit your classroom.

As I was building up our arsenal of task products to fill our shelves, I asked my husband to create some PVC pattern designs which I took pictures of to give the students a pattern to follow. Example of our product below,


The students love to recreate the patterns and like how they become more challenging. We also have some students that like to try creating their own pattern that we take pictures of so other students can try to recreate their design. This is just one of the many uses for PVC in the classroom. The nice thing is that I went to the local building store and told them what I was using the products for and they graciously gave me the materials shown in the box for FREE!!

Here are just a few images of ideas you could do from helping create student aids to organization.