An educator shows how to adapt zoo-themed books for students with autism. She uses The Autism Helper's "Where Are the Zoo Animals?" to teach prepositions and a counting book to teach numbers, adjusting each for errorless learning or added challenge based on student needs.
One of my favorite things to do in the spring was bring my class to the zoo, and we always prepped by using adaptive books. I loved kind of creating that thematic unit. So let's look at two of my favorite adaptive books that can be used if you are going to the zoo. The first one from The Autism Helper is Where Are the Zoo Animals? I love this one because we are going to be working on prepositions, and so as I open this up, we're simply locating where the animals are, and you can see we've got the prepositions off to the side. I've just prepped this very simply by making the book, and then on the very last page, I added some binding here, and then I added the preposition page so that way, as students are working, they always have it available. Um, you can see that I can figure out where the animals are located, You know, here the zebra is in front of the tree. Where's the dolphin, um, in conjunction to the fish? So he is above. And you can just go through this entire book and work on prepositions, but then you can also talk about all the animals that you will see at the zoo, everything from monkeys to crocodiles to giraffes. Whales, turtles, elephants, lots of fun activities that you can do here. The next one is a little bit more basic, and this one is counting animals. And here we are simply counting the zebras or the zoo animals, and we are identifying how many. Um, here we've got spots, so students have a field of 3 that they're choosing from. If I needed to make this more simple or errorless for a user, I would simply only give 1 option. And so that way the student is used to— we can model the counting and then they can move over the number and then we can help them identify that 1 is the same as the quantity of 1. Then if I wanted to make it a little bit harder for learners, I could give a field of 2 and of course I could use a field of 3. But these are lots of fun ways that I can talk about animals, talk about the things that we might see at the zoo, and incorporate some academics too.
