Michelle, an autistic support teacher, shows how to build task boxes for under five dollars each using district supplies, dollar store finds, and repurposed containers. She walks through assembling boxes for fine motor and math skills, labeling them by level, and organizing materials so paraprofessionals can run stations independently.
Let's talk about setting up an independent task box center using as little of our hard-earned money as possible. I'm Michelle with The Autism Helper. I'm a primary self-contained autistic support teacher, and this is my classroom. Today I'm going to show you how I make some task boxes using the district-provided materials that I'm given every school year. Let's go! To start, this is my color printer that my principal pays for. All I had to do was ask for a color printer that I could use for visuals in my classroom, and if I needed to, I could provide support as to why visuals are so important for my students with autism. All I did was ask, and he said yes. I'm very blessed with the district that I work in. They give me a yearly budget to purchase things for my classroom, and so what I've done over the years is I have invested in a really good laminator. This is the GBC or Swingline laminator. Every year I also make sure to stock up on the 5ml lamination sheets, the Velcro dots from Finer Supply, white printer paper, different manipulative items from Lakeshore Learning, and then I also get these shoebox storage containers from Amazon. And these help me easily put my task boxes into these bins, and it helps with storing these task box bins as well. Now, being a teacher, unfortunately I can't use my school budget on everything, so I do end up spending some of my own money on things. And this is where I like to get really creative and try to get the most for my money. Something like this I found at Target in the summertime during their, like, dollar bin. So you can see I paid $3 for these, and I looked and I'm like, "Okay, great! I can make 2 task boxes out of these because there's 2 sets of these numbers," and these are going to be great for fine motor skills. These little sticks I had donated to me from my— one of my parents, and these came from the dollar store, and these are perfect for simple put-in tasks such as using a coffee creamer bottle where students are going to put those in. Just to give you an idea of some other task boxes that can be used with my classroom friends, Here I have a fine motor bin, and the students are going to place the erasers onto the pencils. This one is a coffee creamer bottle that I saved, and I just used Velcro to Velcro pennies on the outside, and so students are going to take off those pennies and put them inside of the bottle. Here's a Lakeshore purchase. This one, students are placing the buttons into the container. Here's another Lakeshore purchase. Students are sorting the colored objects. Another Lakeshore purchase. Students are placing the pegs into the container. Here's one that I found some stickers in the Target dollar section. Again, students are sorting emotions. Students just open, get the pieces out, close it up, and then they sort the pieces. I found these colored bins and I thought, oh, how perfect, because Walmart sells these colored sticks, so students place these out on a table and then put the sticks inside. Okay, so now that you've seen some of the materials that I'm using to create this amazing task box center, let me show you how I make a task box from start to finish. So when using a fun manipulative like this, I'm going to go through and pick maybe 5 or 6 of the locks to put into one of these boxes with the corresponding key, and then students— this one will be ready to go on the shelf. So let's do that. And in my classroom, students are usually working on either numbers 1 through 10 or numbers 1 through 20, so I'm going to keep my task boxes at those skill levels. So here, this one will be 1 through 5, and the next one will be 5 through 10. Okay, so these two are ready to go, and I'm just going to have to add one of my shapes labels— or not my shapes, sorry, my numbers. This one's going to be a math one, so I keep my numbered bins in the math subject. And now this bin is numbers 10 through 20, so this will be a little bit more challenging for some of my students who are working at higher levels. And again, I'm going to put one of my number cards, like, just like that, onto this bin, and it will be ready to go. And a super easy trick or tip for you guys: save these boxes. Because if you come over here and you look at this box here, this was made using an old flip-top box just like that. When we save our boxes, they can come— become amazing task boxes. This one I used one of those boxes. I printed out a rainbow sheet. I cut some slits in there, and then I found these again at Walmart. And students, all they have to do is put these into the color, the corresponding color, and they're turning as they're matching the color. Okay, so for these number clips, I went into Google Slides and I created these boxes with just numbers in them. And then I also created the boxes, and I added a shape, and I just duplicated it to however many quantities I needed. And when I make the boxes, I'm going to save a piece of lamination, and I will show you what I use that for later. Now that each of my number cards have been laminated, I'm going to create my boxes. So with my clips, I was able to make two different types of task boxes, and I like to clip the clips onto a card so students are able to stay organized. And then this one, students are just matching by the number that's on the clip. Over here, students are going to do one-to-one correspondence, so they're having to count the cards and then match by the number. And this one, you can also do number words, and you can make it a little bit more difficult that way. —with my locks. I have numbers 1 through 5 here, numbers 6 through 10 here, and then over here in this bin I have numbers 11 through 20 for students who need a bit more of a challenge or for students who can work a little bit faster than their peers. So I just made 5 new task boxes. In literally no time whatsoever, and I used very minimal of my own money. Now if you look at the back side of my bins, I have these blue sticky notes here, and that's just to let my paraprofessionals know which students can do these bins because I don't want to give my students work that's too hard or too easy for them here at my task box center. For more tips and resources to help you help people with autism, like and subscribe to The Autism Helper on YouTube and check out our blog at theautismhelper.com.
