Guest Blog from Breezy Special Ed!

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I am so excited to share my long overdue guest blog from my friend, Breezy Special Ed.  Her blog is phenomenal and her products are fabulous.  I love to find fellow bloggers who create things that can be of use in MY classroom.  I especially love her interest in creating community products.  This post is all about her Library Community Unit!
Be sure to visit her teachers pay teachers store HERE!
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I special education teach in a functional high school program for students with multi-needs. Since our program is life skill based, I try to make everything we do connect with the “real-world.” One of the ways we do this is through our community trips and the ways we prepare for those community trips.

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.

In addition to the detailed coloring book social story, I created a simple social story that discusses the field trip directly instead of the general community event.

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.

We played an If/Then game to prepare us for a variety of library situations. We play it like a matching game of sorts and it works out great! Most of my student think it’s really fun 🙂
In addition to the unit materials above, we watched this Arthur video on YouTube, this lesson on BrainPopJr (if you have a subscription), and went to our school library to practice our library skills!

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!

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