5 Task Box Hacks for Special Education Teachers

Task boxes are closed-ended tasks that are typically stored in a bin. Closed-ended tasks means there's a clear start and a finish, so the student will know when to begin and know when the task is done. Task bins are great for building independence but also for practicing academic and functional life skills. Today I'm going to be sharing 5 hacks for improving your task boxes. These little tricks will help your system run more smoothly, help your students be more independent, and really level up the learning opportunities that you're giving your students. I'm Sasha Long. I'm a former special education teacher and a board-certified behavior analyst, and I love sharing simple strategies to help your classroom run more smoothly. The first tip is for your students focusing on foundational skills. Now, you maybe started this video and you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know what tasks my students can do by themselves yet. For your students working on foundational skills, focus on fine motor activities and put-in tasks. Now I love a put-in task because you can basically go to your recycling bin or go to your kitchen and make one out of all the things you have there. So this task right here is a simple put-in task. All the student has to do is take these pom-poms and put them in the water bottle. I like using even some of these big size pom-poms because they really have to work on pushing it in there. Great fine motor skills, great to build sustained attention, task initiation, and this is going to work on independence. I actually love using a bottle like this that has a lid for this type of task because then it's really easy to empty out later when the student is done. If you use a water bottle, it's a little trickier. That's a great put-in task. Super simple. Something you can work with your foundational skill students on. Then you can level it up. Once they get good at this, then you can make it a little trickier. Here we have the same idea, but with a spice container. Again, we're going to our recycling bin. We're gonna reuse all the stuff that we've already used before, and we're gonna put paper clips in there. So we really have to focus on grabbing the paperclip, putting it right in the right spot. This takes a lot of attention, a lot of fine motor skills, and a lot of focus here. So a great way to level that up. You can also work on assembly or deassembly tasks. Um, this is another great thing to build those fine motor skills, build that hand strength. Work with your occupational therapist on this to get ideas. This one is so simple. We've got two bins here. This one has some Unifix cubes that are already put together. And the student's job is to take them apart. So you really gotta work on grabbing, you have to work on pulling, you have to work on putting them apart, right? This task could also be one that goes back and forth. If they're already separated, you work on putting them together. So these are all things you probably typically have in your classroom and you can easily make a whole huge set of these just by using what you already have. Tip number 2, embed academics into your task boxes. Oh my gosh, this is such a great opportunity to work, work on language arts, math, science, and social studies. I have examples of all 4 of those right here. Work on skills that are previously mastered that you want to generalize and maintain. After a student masters a concept, you still want them to practice this. So we have reading, math, social studies, and science right here. I'm going to show you how to set up different types of academic task boxes and tie in a little fine motor skills along the way. So this first one here is working on reading comprehension. These are really simple flashcards that have a fill-in-the-blank with 2 word options. You could easily make a way harder version of this. Really any task card could be used here. I put a little fine motor spin on it by putting paper clips here and having the student paper clip the correct answer. So here it's "I blank frosting on the cupcake," and I'm going to put my paper clip on the word "put" for the correct answer. So for each one, I'm going to put the paper clip on the correct answer and a great way to practice real-world-based fine motor skills here. So that's an example of a great language arts one. Here on math, we've got a tricky one. I love this one. This one is working on coin combinations. So the students have all of these different cards that have a coin, uh, amount on here, a money amount, and they have to find the 3 different ways that you make that amount of money. This is a long and hard task, but Some of our kids are ready for this. So I'm gonna grab a piece off of here. I'm gonna count up how much it is, and then I'm gonna add it right on. Once I get all 3 pieces on all of the puzzles, then I'm all done. So that's a great math one. Here we have social studies. Here we are working on maps. There's a short map with a few directions. I have all my pieces right here. It says, put the black car west of the red car. That one's done. Put the purple car, north of the black car. So I'm working on cardinal directions in my task box. How amazing is that? And last, we have a science one. So here it's kind of set up where I don't even have to touch it, which is great. I'm sorting things that are hot versus things that are cold. So I'm going to grab a picture. Here I have a match. I'm going to put that in things that are hot. I have snow. I'm going to put that in things that are cold. Great way to work on a simple sorting concept that is academic-based. Tip number 3: make them real-world-based and functional. This is for you, my junior high and high school teachers. Your task boxes should be functional. If you teach a 15-year-old right now and he is sorting little colored bears into little colored cups, no way! He is way too old for that little kid task. There's so many different ways to match and sort colors that are functional. Here are 3 examples of functional skills. And by the way, you can do these with your younger students too. It's a great way to build household chore skills and really prep for those life skills. Here we have a super simple one. This is just sorting spoons and forks. I have one in each bin. I'm gonna go through and sort. The next level of this task could be wrapping a fork and a spoon and a knife in a napkin like you would at a restaurant if you have a job. Here's another great one, super real-world based. Here we're hole punching. I've got a 3-hole punch, I've got some worksheets, I've got to go one at a time or a few at a time and hole punch each one and then put them back when I'm done. Bonus points if you really need these hole punched because then you got your work done for you, right? And then this last one is a great one— matching socks. How functional, right? We all match socks after we fold our laundry. Go to the dollar store, buy a bunch of packs of kids' socks in different colors. We're working on color matching, we're working on fine motor skills of matching and pulling through, right? I mean, look at all of these great fine motor skills that we are working on by matching socks. Real-world-based, functional. You can now tell mom or dad or caregivers, hey, your son can be matching his own socks at home and putting his laundry away. So matching socks, putting it in that finished spot. So think about real-world-based tasks. You can easily go through things already in your classroom, in your house, or at the dollar store and make some very simple functional tasks. Tip #4: Make the tasks long. This is not to be mean. This is not because it's busy work. I hate the phrase busy work that insinuates this is not an important skill. What we are building here is work endurance. We want our kids to be able to work for longer time periods. When you have to write an IEP, You don't just sit down in 5-minute spurts and write it. You sit down maybe for an hour and work on it. That's what we want with our students, work endurance. When they have a job at a restaurant sorting silverware, it's not gonna be 5 sets of silverware, it's gonna be 50 or 500, right? So start with smaller tasks, but increase the length and know that that's the goal in your head, that we're gonna be making these tasks longer and longer. A few ways you can do this. This task I showed earlier, this is a long, hard task. This requires a lot of focus. I've got right now, I think about, 6 of these different puzzles in here. You could start off with 2, you could build it to 3, to 4, and increase the length of this academic task. With your fine motor tasks, you can be doing the same thing. This is another one I showed before. Maybe you start out with just 15 paper clips and then you build to adding more and more paper clips, so it's going to take longer and longer to do. Again, this is building work endurance, that sustained attention, and this is an essential life skill. This is not to be mean, This is important. These are the skills that get our students jobs, that increase to more academic opportunities. So thinking about academic skills, this is one that is a really long task. This is matching word to picture. I think I've got about 50 or 60 of these cards in here. Here's the— what the words look like, and then I have all of the pieces right here. Now what I love about this task is this task requires some planning. And organization. If I were to sit here and have this one that says hand and then have to search through and find hand, match it, and then I get my next one, it's gonna take me a long time. I love when I see students get creative with a task like this. Maybe they lay all of these out on the table like this, and then they go through and find the piece and go and match it. That whole setup process that they're instigating is really important, and that's what we want to teach and model. How do we set up these tasks? How do we clean up these tasks? What's the most efficient way to do it? Something like this. Maybe you start off with 5 or 10 cards and then you increase the length over time. Tip number 5: set up your task boxes so the tasks are easy to do. Think about the logistics. Two important ways I like to do this are first by putting the movable pieces on the inside cover of the bin. I've showed a few activities where I had it set up this way. This eliminates the need to go through and find something. It keeps that setup a little cleaner and smoother. Another way you can do this is by Velcroing some of the, the tools right in the bin. So here, if I tip it over, if I fall, everything's fine because it's Velcroed right in here. On the bottom of my basket of paper clips, I put some Velcro, and I put some in the bottom up here. So the student, when they get this task box, they can basically just open this up and they can start working right away. And it's all neatly in this task bin, easy for them to do, all kind of contained. So think about those logistics. Alright, so those were my 5 task box hacks for you. I want really you to get creative with this. Be open-minded. Think about so many different things that could go in these bins to help your students not only build independence but build their academic and functional skills. I'm Sasha Long, founder of The Autism Helper. Click subscribe for more ideas for your classroom.