Special Ed Classroom Setup: Organizing Task Boxes

Task boxes are a great way to build independent skills. Independence is an essential life skill that your students need. I'm Sasha Long, I'm a former special education teacher and board certified behavior analyst, and I'm going to show you how to get started with task boxes if you've never done them before, or how to level up your task box system if you already have it running. Step 1 of getting started with task boxes is to get a ton of activities that your students can do on their own. If independently. I would say with like 90, 80% independence. Like maybe they need a smidge of help, but ideally these are things that they can do completely on their own. We're going to talk about how to differentiate that in a second. Now these could be things like put-in tasks where you are just putting an item in. If you have really early learners, these are great for things like that. You can have assembly tasks like putting cubes together, sorting tasks, sorting forks and spoons. These are all things you probably have in your house, in your classroom already. Go to the Dollar Tree, go to your own house, your recycling bin, and you can find all kinds of stuff to make tasks like this. These types of tasks could be file folder activities, or they could be academic tasks, maybe sorting things that are hot and cold, or looking at money ideas. These could also be task cards that you put in with a dry erase marker, so they're laminated. Here we're working on inferences. So they can be academic all the way through basic fine motor skills. Now let's talk about how many tasks you need. Now, don't want this to scare you, but I— my goal would be for each student to have 15 different tasks that they can do independently. So if you have Johnny, you have 15 tasks that Johnny can do on his own. Now that's not saying that no one else can use any of those 15 tasks, right? I'm gonna show you a way in a minute on how to really get organized with what tasks each students are using. But that's the idea. You want about 15 tasks per student that they can do on their own. The reason 15 is the magic number is that I like to usually do about 3 tasks per day, and if we have 15 tasks that the student can do on their own, then they're not repeating the task at all during the week. So if Johnny's gonna do pom-poms on Monday, he's not gonna do pom-poms again until next Monday. We don't want our kids to get bored, right? So So if you have 15 tasks they can do on their own, then they can do 3 a day and not have to repeat until the next week. So once you have your tasks set up, then we're gonna get them in the bins and figure out our schedule. To help you get organized with what types of tasks each student needs, I would recommend grouping your students into 3 groups for this: students that can do easy tasks, medium tasks, and hard tasks. And, and list those students, you know, Johnny, Alex, and Sarah. These are the types of tasks they can do. They can do put-in tasks, they can do matching, they can do color sorting. Um, Alex, Javier, and Juan, these are the tasks they can do. And then students enlisted the tasks they can do. So go through your tasks and start to group them into 3 groups. That will really help you see which tasks you need more of. Maybe you need more hard tasks, maybe you need more easy tasks, because again, you want there to be about 15 per student, so you need about 15 in each section. Then this is where the magic really starts to happen. So we're going to talk in a minute about how to label your tasks, but first I want you to make a list of all of the tasks that you have. So here I went through all the letters of the alphabet, and then I went through number 19. These are the different tasks I have. Then I went through and color-coded them. Green ones are easy based on this list we just did, blue ones are medium, yellow ones are hard. So again, I have an idea, and this is going to help for our step when we're making our schedules of what tasks we have. Now that we have all of our tasks and our task list, now we're going to load our tasks into bins and create a system for scheduling out these tasks. We want part of the Independent Work Box system to be finding your assigned task, setting it up, putting it away, and finding the next task. This whole system of transitioning between task boxes is really important because Part of the skill here is setting up the tasks, completing the task, putting it away, and then finding your next assignment. That's what we all do when we do independent work, right? If you have to go fold your laundry, you have to go find that clean laundry, get it out of the dryer, put it in the, in the laundry basket, bring it to where you fold the laundry, right? That's part of the task. So same thing here. Part of the task is finding out what you're assigned, completing the activity, putting it away, finding the next thing. So we're going to first put everything in a bin. I tend to like shoebox size bins. You can find these at the Dollar Tree. Um, I like just keeping them the same as much as possible, but I will talk about some differentiation options in a minute. So as you can see in here, I have my sorting by silverware. I put all the silverware on one side and my two bins. This is nice because the setup's really easy, right? The student doesn't have to do anything when they get the bin, they're ready to go. There can be some setup required if you want, but that depends on the skill level of the student. Here's a different task. This is matching sentences to a picture. So we're working on reading comprehension, we're working on advanced academics here versus basic sorting. We can have both types of skills in the same system, which is why I love this. So we're gonna put everything in our bins and then we're gonna decide how to label these bins. So you may have noticed this one's labeled with a letter and this one is labeled with a colored shape. If your students can reliably match letters and numbers, then go ahead and label all of your bins with letters or numbers because they're going to be using this to find out what they're assigned to. So Alex will have this mini schedule for his task box center. First, he's assigned letter A. He will take it off, match it at letter A, do the task, and then he can either leave it on there— and that's a great way to show the staff which ones have to be redone— or maybe he puts it in a finished bin, depending on your system. So here is how he knows what he's assigned. After A, he goes and finds Task G, and then he goes and finds Task D, and then he's all done. Now, if your students cannot reliably match letters and numbers yet, do not use letters and numbers, right? That's gonna be something that is not accessible and understandable to them. For those students, I like using colored shapes like this, and I like actually cutting out the shape because this is a great alternative, right? All of the shapes are labeled in the same system. John first has green circle. Um, so he goes green circle, does the task. Now he has pink square, does the task. Now you can differentiate this in any way. I have set this up in a classroom with all pictures of fruits and vegetables. It was adorable. You could put preferred items and name them all with cartoons if you're in an early childhood class. These could be just different colored boxes. They could be literally anything. We've also done some color coding with letters as well. So the idea is that we're labeling the bin and the task, and that we are having that associated label on the schedule. Now let's talk about some different tricks for setting up your bins and what some bin alternatives could be. Some alternatives to using bins: you can go ahead and put your letters or your color, however you're labeling your bins, right on a file folder. So when they get G, they do this file folder activity. That's a great way to do that. That— I love using also these small size task bins. These are those Iris photo storage holders. You can put the label here, you could even put the label small there. And if you have bins that you're using for other activities, this is an Ables set of task cards that I put a dry erase marker in. I also labeled that for a task bin center. So lots of alternatives there within the any size bin, whether it's shoebox or other. You can also really create the activity within this bin, like I showed with the silverware set, something that's a little bit more advanced that you might have some pieces on. I love storing the pieces on the inside cover of the task bin. So here it's Putting items according to map directions, and all the pieces are right there. So it's pretty easy for the student to set up. Again, literally all they do is open it and they are good to go. The last piece to really leveling up your independent work box system is to create a schedule for each day of the week. So looking at— here's kind of a finished version— having a schedule for Monday, for Tuesday, for Wednesday of what 3 tasks each student is doing. This can be a little bit time-consuming to set up, but once you have it, you are set for the year and you know that students are all doing tasks at the same level, at the correct level, and they're not repeating tasks too often. So this is where that task list that you color-coded will come in handy. We have all of the easy tasks color-coded, the medium, and the hard. Once you put your students on this schedule, then these are the students that need the easy ones, that need the medium, that need the hard. You just go in and add those and then you rotate for the different days. So on Tuesday, Sam is doing B, F, and 3, and on Monday, and then on Tuesday, he's doing G, Q, and V. So he's not doing the same tasks multiple days in a row. You can set that all up, and then this will create that mini schedule for your students. Working independently is such an important life skill, and task boxes are a great way to work on that skill for your students at all levels, whether you are preschool, elementary, or high school special education teacher, task bins will work so well for your classroom. Again, I am Sasha Long from The Autism Helper. Please subscribe to our channel for more tips for structuring your special education classroom.