Gina from The Autism Helper shows how to simplify a fridge activity for young learners with autism. Use clear plastic eggs to teach the verb "open," and build a hands-on fridge from a shoebox and photo to practice food vocabulary like meat, cheese, and yogurt.
Hi everyone, it's Gina from The Autism Helper. I'm here to show you a really fun way to adapt some of our fun adapted books into different activities, especially for maybe learners just starting out on learning how to do a simple task but yet still learning vocabulary that's really important, functional skills, functional language, task completion, all kinds of great skills in these books and these activities. So So the first one is the new What's in the Fridge adapted book. I love this one. Um, I modified it because the kiddos that I'm currently work— working with are super, super young, and they are just learning how to read through an adapted book and put little pieces onto, um, the page. So instead of having them actually count out numbers of beverages or orange juice, we simply are just taking the orange juice and putting it in the fridge and going through the book like that. Oh, there's some eggs, let's put them in the fridge. The next one is, um, I took out some of the pieces and I put them into these fun clear plastic eggs because, as you know, just opening the egg itself and pulling out the piece is more engaging than maybe just having it on a page. So working on that core word open, and then just having them literally put them in the fridge and talking about what it is— meat, cheese, yogurt, grapes, and there's some ketchup in this one. The last way you can do this is I took a picture of the fridge and I just taped it on this shoebox. It's an old glass box. And these cards are from the Building Language Photo Library by Lakeshore. You don't need these, um, specifically if you don't have them already. Or maybe you have a local dollar store and you just buy some picture flashcards, or just use things that are in your classroom or that mean something to the child. Maybe it's actual pictures of the foods and snacks that they like at home, and we're just putting them in the fridge. So, "What's in the fridge?" "Strawberries!" And they put them into the fridge, and so on with the fish and cheese and maybe other preferred food items. That way they're learning important vocabulary, and maybe the food items are what they're actually using at home or in school. So, those are just some fun ideas with the What's in the Fridge activity book.
