Gina from The Autism Helper shows how to build a themed learning basket with low-cost materials like Sarah's Vehicle Adaptive Book, sorting pages, and language games. The basket helps toddlers and early learners practice categorization, matching, and language skills across different settings throughout the week.
Hi everyone, this is Gina from The Autism Helper. I'm here to show you today how to set up a themed basket either for your families at home, how to empower your families at home to do this, or it goes along with the lines with how you may teach in school. So I have put together today a vehicle-inspired basket, very much inspired by Sarah's new Vehicle Adaptive book series. They are amazing. As soon as I saw these, I ran and printed them out and assembled them because they are fantastic. In my blog, I show you different ways to use this basket type of organization for different ages, for babies, toddlers, and early learners. So let's take a look at what can go in the basket. It doesn't have to be a fancy basket, obviously, and you want to make sure that your parents and families know that too. This is not something that they have to go out and buy. It's just a matter of gathering materials that are themed so that kids start to generalize concepts. So when I see a vehicle like this, it's still a vehicle when I see it like this in an object form. So these baskets really help target all different types of skills and generalization. So first, of course, I have the New Adapted Books in here, which I love. And what they, what your child has to do is they can read the book with you, just look through the pages with you depending on where they are, and then they pick out the right vehicle that matches the pictures. So I have a vehicle adaptive book in here. I have, um, some of the pages from the Big and Little sort that Sarah has created. I left them out because I was thinking you could actually make a double copy of one of them and you could actually turn this into a matching activity. So you can double up that. Of course, the big and little sorts that Sarah created are incredible for that concept. So showing them how to categorize and sort, that's a huge skill, very, very important basic learner skill. That's something else you can put in your basket. And then of course, my favorite language lotto game that have vehicles that go, And this is matching the vehicle to the identical picture. And all my kids love, love, love this game. But again, you're working on a really important skill. And then using those vehicles, cars, to practice putting them in something and combining objects during play. This is a really big skill too. A lot of kids may just roll cars back and forth in front of their eyes or on the carpet. And we wanna expand play opportunities to show them how they can use other things around the house, a couch cushion with the car. And then for your more advanced learners or just like older learners in general, you could also have the category Mega Pack that Autism House that I love. They can color in all the vehicles. You can turn this into a following directions activity in school. Color the bike, circle the tractor. And then there's different types. So you see how it gets a little bit bigger, the field, and then there are other things on this page other than vehicles. So they really have to discriminate and generalize and know what a vehicle is. And then we also have an awesome cut and paste activity. So of course you're not gonna do all of this in one day, but it's nice to have a box full of materials that you can use throughout the week. I encourage families to do this at home with different things. That way it's there, it's a target, and then it keeps everyone a little bit more organized for learning. So let me know what you put in your learning baskets this week.
