Sasha demonstrates an adapted picture book that teaches children with autism to order at fast-food restaurants using repeated scripts and Velcro-matched pictures. Kids learn language through six restaurants, and many start echoing the phrases on their own. The book uses laminated, durable pages stored in a binder.
Hi, this is Sasha from theautismhelper.com, and this is a restaurant of my "Still Hungry" book. I named it something different here because I made this a long time ago, but I kind of liked the "Still Hungry" name a little bit better. But all the pictures are exactly the same, so I'm going to give you a brief tutorial on what it is and why I like it. And as you can see, mine is very worn and these pictures are kind of nasty because this was our most popular— I mean, still is our most popular book. Food is motivating. I don't know what to tell you. It's not healthy. It's not the greatest concept, but if it's going to get my kids interested in reading, the ones that hate books and the ones that struggle with language, if this is getting them talking and interested in books, I'm all for it. So that's kind of the concept of this. I also really like it and originally developed this book to work on ordering in the community skills. So how to order fast food, how to order your meal at a restaurant, and kind of using that repetitive language to build that script. Stripped. So basically every page you're going to match the picture. I made a bunch of these, like they're just extra cardboard and I put strips of hard Velcro so I could just store the pictures on the side. This one has a ton of pictures, so one with a bunch of Velcro is great. So you just go ahead and match every, every picture on each page. I like having the books with a lot of pictures too because it's not so fast for some of our kiddos that can just whip through these matching activities, so they really do need to discriminate the pictures. So it goes through this familiar script of, "Welcome to Pizza Hut, can I take your order?" So they're gonna match the cashier picture, the Pizza Hut picture, and then the next page is, "I'll have one large cheese pizza, please." So kind of following the script of how you order at a restaurant. And then this page is after every ordering page. It says, "Mmm, that was good, but I'm still hungry, where else should I go?" And I swear to you, some of my kids that had very little language started repeating this because they really loved this book and it has this same structure of this sentence, that they really did start saying some of these words on their own and putting these phrases together, which was really cool to see. I'm not going to match all of them because it'll take a while, but, um, Dairy Queen, ordering ice cream. So that same page again. Welcome to Burger King, can I take your order? I'll have one Whopper with everything. And in the book I put on Teachers Pay Teachers, I did call it a burger because that was the one thing I didn't love about this when I made it, is a Whopper wasn't totally the best vocabulary term to teach each. So the same page, "Mmm, that was good. Where else should I go?" Going to KFC, "I'll have chicken." The same thing, Taco Bell, "2 hard shell tacos," finding the taco picture. That same page again, McDonald's is the last location, "Last order," and then finally fall. So kind of goes through 6 different restaurants with that same script, and I know it seems really repetitive, but I like that it gives kids multiple opportunities to practice the skills, because sometimes I think when we work on things, we'll give it one or two chances, but really giving it enough opportunities to practice, that really helps out. Um, and then I Velcroed, um, put some hard Velcro here, and I put Velcro on the baggie so I don't lose the bag when I put it in here. Um, I laminated these pages, but this would be a great one to put in page protectors and save yourself some laminating, because I know this book's really long, and you could do them double-sided then, so you could put it even in a smaller binder if you want. Yep, this was a product preview of my restaurant book, Still Hungry, an adapted book for children with autism by theautismhelper.com.
