Jen from The Autism Helper shows how to set up color-coded bins and task cards for independent work with kindergarten and early grade students. Tasks must be previously mastered skills, and she demonstrates error-less matching activities like color and letter matching, plus a rotating shelf system so materials are always ready to swap in when students finish.
Hey guys, this is Jen from The Autism Helper. I've got a blog post out today talking about setting up independent work for younger students. So, I teach K-1 and 2. Most of my students this year are in kindergarten. We are working on skills such as matching letters. That is not yet an independent skill. However, almost all of my students know their colors. So this year I chose to color code my independent work. Previously, I had used this work system. If you've got older students or students who can match letters, this is a great choice. You write the student's name and then their work tasks here, and these correlate to the work task on the shelf. So remember that independent work should be previously mastered skills. These are things that students can do independently. So, I have pulled task cards that are independent work for each student and put them in these bins right here. So, as I pull out my red student's bin, these are all independent tasks specific for that student. I will show you those in just a second. Then, down here, I've got independent adapted books. If you are like me, you need some errorless matching in your life and easy matching. We are loving these Daily Books. These are phenomenal. We will link these below for you. I'm talking like super, super simple matching, color matching, errorless matching. These are phenomenal. For my beginning learners, those learners who are really learning how to learn and learning how to do independent work. I mean, here we're just putting the people in the bank, so it's that simple task for them. So these are all aligned by color, and then I've got one kid who is doing some binder work, and these are interactive reading binders. And so this student knows already how to match, and they can actually receptively— they're working on receptive ID of letters, but they know how to match letters. So that's what this skill is covering, and there's all kinds of things in here. So these are some of my favorite tools for independent work. So I have those all on the shelf, color-coded and ready to go. So the next thing I have is this, and I just made this. This is really simple. It matches their color. And then I put a picture icon that matches what they're supposed to do. So task boxes, file folders, journals, adaptive books, whatever it is, I put it on here. And so now they know what they're supposed to do and where they're supposed to go, what task they're supposed to pull. And I will actually— one of my goals today is to put that icon here as well so they can match the picture and their color. This shelf over here holds all of my extra materials because I want to rotate out what I'm doing, and so I have all of these extra materials prepped and ready to go. So when I'm ready to rotate through, it's all there. Color coding makes total sense for those beginning learners, and so do errorless tasks. Don't forget things like put-in tasks to too. Heather has an amazing blog on expanding put-in tasks. I think that's great. Um, any of these skills, any of these books would be phenomenal. You've got students who are working on shapes, we've got shape books, we've got counting books, we have got— as you can see, I'm probably multiple copies of things. And then we've got even students working on things like preposition and where is the kitten. And so then identifying where the kitten is by looking at the image and then listening. These are phenomenal resources. One last tip I have for you is that to keep all these books straight, I use these dots. These dots are great. I just take one and I put it in the top corner of the book, and that way when we go to organize and reset everything, I know what color bin that book goes into. And then I just pull that dot off, put a new one on, and we're ready to go. You'll see this one has got a green dot on it. When I'm ready to switch them out next week, I will trade that for whatever student's ready for this material. I hope this has been helpful for you. If you have any questions, drop them down below. We're always happy to help. Thanks, guys!
