Gina from The Autism Helper shows how to build visual supports for cookie decorating in PowerPoint using iPhone photos and pre-made templates. Add text labels for each step, then layer in narration, core language boards, or AAC devices so students can follow along and practice communication.
Hi everyone, it's Gina from The Autism Helper. I'm here to show you how to make a quick visual to go along with any holiday activity that you might be doing this month. This one's about how to decorate cookies. It's not super detailed, so if you feel like you need to take more pictures of the actual steps, feel free to do that. But also, you can use this certain template for your cookie decorating, or you can create your own using your own images or images off of Google, whatever you decide to do. But I like to create things within PowerPoint. It's just an easy way to to format things. Word kind of gives me a lot of trouble sometimes. So for this visual, I just simply took pictures of the ingredients that I had to make the cookies. These were packaged cookies. You don't have to buy decorating kit. You can go through my blog and figure out more ideas instead of buying a kit. But cookies comes with some icing and then sprinkles. And like I said, if you want to take pictures of the actual breakdown of the steps for your kids, you can do that too. But this is a nice easy reference to point to and say, okay, let's choose our cookie. Let's put on some icing, get our icing. All right, next is our sprinkles. So you can just start with a blank slide, and then if you can take some photos from your iPhone, that is super easy, and AirDrop them over. And then when I drop them into my PowerPoint, I get these really cool design ideas over here that are already formatted for me. So if you like this option with the gray boxes, you can go with that. If you like it with these black boxes around, which actually I really like this one now that I'm looking at it, Or you can format it any way, but there's lots of ideas that just automatically pop up for you. And then you can just add a text box to the top and type in any type of text that you want. Pick a cookie, or maybe choose a cookie, or get cookie, whatever you want it to say. But I do like to always make sure I have some type of text to go along to support that literacy aspect so that kids are also seeing some words. And then you can just reformat it. So, um, simple, simple, easy way to do this. And then just reference it as you're making the decorating the cookie steps. You could take your own cookie first and model how to go through each one of these boxes, narrate your language, use children's devices, use a core language board, um, and then you can go through and help your students decorate their own cookie, or just let them go ahead and do it on their own and see what they come up with. At the end, you can describe your cookie with what color icing you used, um, and different types of language like, "Let's, um, stack the cookies," "Let's ice the cookies," and so on. So I hope you have fun with this activity, and let me know if you guys decorate cookies this holiday.
