In this product preview, Sasha from TheAutismHelper.com introduces an 11‑resource set of day‑ and month‑focused file‑folder activities designed as extensions for morning circle or meeting calendar work. The resources span a spectrum from very basic matching tasks to more advanced, time‑consuming activities, allowing teachers to differentiate for older learners and students with autism. Sasha walks through each activity, highlighting its purpose, skill focus, and how it can be scaffolded: simple matching of days, ordering days, out‑of‑order matching with varied fonts, fill‑in‑the‑missing sequencing, spelling days (using letter pieces or dry‑erase), analogous month activities (matching, ordering, advanced fonts), spelling months, matching months to abbreviations and numbers, and finally matching written dates to numerical dates. Throughout, she emphasizes age‑appropriate design, engagement, functional date‑writing skills, and the importance of providing challenging yet relevant extensions to keep students occupied and reduce inappropriate behaviors.
Chapters
Hi, this is Sasha from TheAutismHelper.com, and this is a product preview of my Day and Month File Folder Activities. So many of us do a morning circle time or morning meeting that involve calendar concepts, and there's a lot of great resources to practice this, but if you want some extensions, I was really struggling with having extra work for some of my, you know, easier tasks, but also needing some more challenging tasks as well. So we really want to, you know, make sure that hands are engaged, our activities are interactive. If kids have nothing to do, kind of, that's when inappropriate behaviors start. So there's a few different range of activities. I had made these for my class a few years ago and then posted these and had a ton of requests to make a version. So there's 11 different resources included, really ranging from more basic and looking at work endurance, kind of a little bit more time-consuming, to more advanced. So I'm going to scroll through these real briefly. So first is just a very easy matching days of the week. These aren't color-coded. These don't have cute clipart. These are very basic. And this is really on purpose. For a lot of our older kids, we want to just really target the skill of matching the words. We don't want it to look babyish, we want it to look age-appropriate. Um, so these are that way on purpose. Next is putting the days of the week in order. I love making an anchor chart with this by just taking a photo of the finished page and having students match to sample. A great way to scaffold to that higher skill. Um, and then matching days of the week. This is kind of more advanced, out of order, different fonts. And a little bit lengthier. So again, we want activities that are going to take some time and not have students fly through it, especially if, you know, kids are maybe doing an extension activity after morning meeting and doing some independent work. This is a great one. Fill in the missing days. I love this for sequencing. This is— we target sequencing a lot, but this is targeting it in a different way with these calendar words. A lot of times we work on today, tomorrow, yesterday as a group, but this kind of gives kids a chance to practice this on their own, filling in those missing days. Next, spelling days of the week with the pieces. So matching the days to the letters to each day of the week. You can also not use the pieces and just have students write this in with a dry erase marker. A great way to work on the spelling of these words. Um, then we have similar activities with the months. So matching the months, putting the months in order, matching the months with the different fonts and mixed up. So again, that more time-consuming matching task. And then filling in the missing month. I love these filling in ones. These are so great to work on. And then the spelling the months. So again, you can use the pieces, the letter pieces, or I really love this as a dry erase marker task as well. Um, this is a great one that's a little trickier too, matching months to abbreviations. So looking at some of these harder skills, um, again, making sure that all of our kids have activities that are at their level and challenging but still focused around the same concept. Matching the month to the number, another great one. These are out of order, so you can't just put them— words and months in order. You gotta really think about it. And then matching the written date to the numerical date. I love these tasks. These are so functional. We all write our dates with the numerical abbreviations, so we want to make sure our kids can as well. So again, this was a product preview of my day and month file folders by theautismhelper.com.
