SpeechSnacks Blogiversary Celebration Guest Post and GIVEAWAY: DAY 4 { “Using Foods to Connect with Your Students” from Speech Language Pirates}

Hi, I’m Denise from Speech Language Pirates. When I was asked to do a guest post about food, I JUMPED on it! I love to eat and I love pretty much all food. The running joke with my friends is that if I’m asked, “Are you hungry?” my response is, “I could eat…”

I work with many self-contained autism and intellectual disability classrooms. Sometimes, it seems hard to engage many students in these classrooms. One “never fail” tactic is to use food. I swear, the second I uncover the food, the students are ALL over – bright eyed, bushy tailed, and ready to work!

I’ve used food in a variety of ways with my students. Here’s a look at some of them.

This winter I made hot cocoa mugs using hot cocoa packets. Take a closer look here.

For Valentine’s Day, I used Jell-O to make cards. Check it out. The Jell-O powder smells AMAZING!

We also did an adapted writing activity.

In the same post as the Valentine’s card, I describe how I celebrated Dr. Seuss week by making Cat in the Hat hats with fruit. The kids were able to cut the bananas themselves! My students eat SO well – the love fruit!

We also used Jell-O to make shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day. Have a look here.

I don’t have pictures nor a corresponding blog post for this idea, but it’s an activity my students loved! The OT and I co-teach with our ID class. We try to incorporate many OT skills, including holding and using food and school utensils, into our lessons. We made fruit salad with many easy-to-cut fruits: bananas, kiwi, grapes, pears, etc. Using Boardmaker, I made a “recipe” with simple steps for the students to follow: 1. cut fruit 2. put in bowl 3. mix 4. eat. We were able to “check off” the steps we had completed. It was great for sequencing because at the end, we put the steps in order. Boardmaker is great for stuff like that! The kids love anything on the SmartBoard! Because the kids can get somewhat impatient, while it was one person’s turn to cut the real fruit, we let the others play with and practice cutting with the Melissa and Doug wooden cutting fruit. I love this set!

***(One of my students has an allergy to strawberries, so I steer clear of all berries just to be safe. Otherwise, I would have used lots of berries in the fruit salad and strawberries Cat in the Hat hats.)