Sasha from theautismhelper.com shows the All About the Mall life-skills unit for special education classrooms. It includes three difficulty levels, pre- and post-tests, adapted books about buying items and parking, 20-25 worksheets per level, social stories, and homework sheets for parents. The unit covers functional vocabulary like escalator and water fountain.
Hi, this is Sasha from theautismhelper.com, and this is a product preview of my All About the Mall Life Skills Unit. So if you've checked out my other Life Skills Units, this is the same structure. This is the Community Series, so we have the mall, the grocery store, the park, and the restaurant. The household unit has 4 as well, so I love that there's 8 total because ideally you could use one a month and have your life skills instruction prepped for the whole school year. I think this would work awesome as a center run by a paraprofessional. This would also work awesome as a classroom theme. Kind of overarching a lot of your instruction. The mall was a great unit for me to work on because it really made me realize how much vocabulary is included in the mall and how many skills we aren't really talking about with our kids. Things like escalators and elevators and can you go in the water fountain? So this brought up a lot of great vocabulary when I was creating this. So I think this would be a really good unit. A lot of our kids go to the mall frequently. This is something we definitely want to talk about. So the table of contents included, very detailed. Some notes to include in your lesson plans, curricular maps, and pages for if you want to only print certain parts. There's 3 levels of pre-test/post-test included. Circle if it's pre or post, show growth throughout the activities, giving the pre-test before instruction, post-test after. The basic level here, Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, so you can really include all of your learners in this unit appropriately. Next is the anchor chart I love the idea of printing this out on a poster board or putting one in each student's binder, projecting on a smartboard. A lot of different ways you can kind of use this reference sheet. Next is the life skills word wall. There's instructions on a few different ways to use this, and I also put some options to create an extended word wall with these blank cards. So there's a description of use in there, and then here are all of our words and definitions for the mall vocabulary. Next we have Homework. I think this is a really important unit. All the units are really important in this series to tie into the home because these are life skills. So we want to be practicing these skills in the house or in the community. So there's 2 different versions of the note home for the parents for you to send and then some homework for parents to do with their kids. In the Mall, there's 2 sets that you could cut in half here and send home for a week, 2 weeks, month, whatever you want to have the due date. And there's 3 levels of difficulty here. A great way to get family involvement. There's 3 social stories, again a great way to get parent involvement. Sending these home, I think a lot of parents would really appreciate these. Next are the adapted books. I love, love, love the adapted books in this series. The car one is one of my favorites. There's instructions for you, how to set up, and then the 3 books. First one, Buying Things at the Mall, we are matching the price to the price tag. So it is some matching, but again looking at that non-identical matching. For a lot of our kids that have good matching skills, this is a great way to kind of increase the level of difficulty of matching and make it functional. So we're matching, you know, the $10 to the $10 price tag, the 99 cents to the 99 cents price tag. So what— for our kids that are matching, they don't always have to be matching just pictures or basic letters. They can be matching something that's functional and life skills based. This parking the car one's my favorite. I think so many kids would love this one. So this is so good to target sequencing. Sequencing is something that a lot of our kids have IEP goals for. And with this goal, we want to have lots of examples. We want to practice this skill really frequently because it's a hard skill. So each page, there's a prompt on parking the car in the next spot, and you go through and park the whole car, and then you can kind of test it at the end and put the cars in the right order with these like mini little cars. So turns out so cute in person. I'm actually in the process of laminating this one right now, so I'll be sharing lots of pictures of this. Let's Go Shopping. This is a great one to work on kind of the more complex categorizing discrimination of matching where you do each of these things in the mall. There's a lot of different places in the mall and we talk a lot about categorizing with our kids, but this is really putting it to real use. When you and I go to the mall, I categorize immediately when I get there. If I need to buy clothes, I go to Target. If I want to get food, I go to the food court. If I want to buy a cupcake, I go to the bakery. So this is kind of tying that real life categorizing into an activity. So real great one. There's 5 file folders: Non-Identical Sorting, Mall Associations, Mall Matching, Mall Sort by Function, and Label Parts of the Mall. So all included in here, lots of great ABLEspace skills. There's about 20 to 25 different worksheets within each level. The Level 1 focuses on matching and tracing. There's 5 examples of each worksheet, so you're not gonna just have 1 worksheet for tracing, you'll have 5 different versions. Which I like and I think is important. These are copying the words, those are tracing. The next level works on some comprehension, so matching word to picture, fill in the blank. These are great for inferencing and reading comprehension, love these. Answering WH questions with the 3 visual response options, really, really love these too, really helpful for a lot of my learners. Writing definition, writing a sentence with each word, writing 3 sentences about a pic— Each picture, so we're getting a little bit more difficult here. Reading comprehension, read the passage, respond to the 5 questions. Answering true or false for each question and making a list for each prompt. And 5 writings. So there's tons and tons included in here from social stories to homework to adapted books. I really kind of couldn't stop creating once I got started on these units, so I really enjoyed it. This was a product preview of All About the Mall, a life skills unit from theautismhelper.com.
