Guest Blog from Breezy Special Ed!
At the beginning of the year, I decided I wanted to make sure I took my students on at least one community trip each month. In order to do this I created a schedule which has helped with the craziness of trying to plan out community trips and also making sure that they happened each month!
My students need A LOT of preparation before attending community trips. Because of this, I typically plan our trips toward the end of the month, so that we have the entire month to prepare for our trip including: videos, books (sometimes self created), worksheets, file folders, social stories, etc. It’s fun for everyone to add some age appropriate themed activities to our typical academic work.
Last month we went to the library for our trip and we used this library unit to prepare.
We played Bingo to get used to library vocab and to start discussing various library situations (such as being quiet, or returning books by their due date). I also used these calling cards to mark our calendar with the date we would be going and brought them along on our trip to use as library reminders and choices for students when answering questions.
The coloring book is one of my favorite parts about this unit for multiple reasons. It makes for a great following directions activity when we color it as a class and I give directions, and then it makes for a great social story book that students can read while we continue to prepare for our trip.
The worksheets for my community trips usually vary, depending on whatever I feel my students need to work on based on the trip. For example, for our bowling trip we did a few worksheets focused on emoney, since they would have opportunities to spend money. However, at the library, we had worksheets on matching books to topics and expected/unexpected behavior sorts.
Our trip went great! My students loved checking out the movies and the magazines. Plus, our library had iPads we could play games on which was a huge hit!
Where do you take your students on community trips? I’m always looking for new places to take my students!