Our Fast Food Community Trip to McDonalds

Our first community trip of the year was a great success and that came with a lot of planning! And it doesn't hurt that fast food is extremely motivating...and I allowed my students to eat ice cream for breakfast. I won't lie, I had a hot fudge sundae before we left, because, it's not everyday you get to go to McDonald's during school! :)

Anyway, let's start at the beginning. I sent home this parent letter in order to inform parents of our upcoming trip as well as give them the words to practice at home.

We did these worksheets pictured above and these ones here scattered throughout the month to work on our regular skills while including some fun fast food trip prep!

There are a few different ways I like to play this "game" with my students. I usually introduce the activity as a class and give each student a red card (a couple students may have to share). I then read the yellow card and asks who has the right response. After going through all the cards like that, each student goes through these on their own and matches them appropriately. You can also do this activity without the red cards and the student actually has to respond like they would in that situation with the clues. 

The social story / coloring book is definitely my favorite part of my community trip materials. It goes through each step very simply and tells you what to do. We read this together as a class. I give directions like "color the tray green" in order to practice some following directions / listening skills. And we also practice and role play each step.

Here's our vocab cards on our pocket chart on our whiteboard. We did a few activities with these, such as taping them to the walls and going on scavenger hunts to find all the symbols. And of course...

We also played BINGO. I love Bingo, my kids love Bingo. It's a win-win all around! I store all of my Bingo boards in sheet protectors in a large binder. It's the best system ever.

We also working on recognizing logos of other fast food restaurants using this adapted book and these flashcards.

We did a lot of role playing and practicing ordering our food, as well as getting our money out of our wallets and handing it over to the cashier. I tell my students if they can't order, they don't get to eat! We aren't going to do it for them, so they have to do it! We also had a countdown going on our calendar. Oh my, my class would be so excited and giggly whenever we were talking about that!

So, even though we spent all month working on saying and recognizing typical food at fast food restaurants like McDonalds....we had to order off the breakfast menu since our trip had to be scheduled in the morning! Since many of my students are non-verbal (and our iPads aren't loud enough to be used as communication devices in the community, I've tried), we used these sentence strips to order our food. It was a great way to allow my students to be independent!

And look how well she's doing ordering her food with her sentence strip!

In case we have extra time after eating, I quickly created this scavenger hunt to go with the steps at McDonalds. You can download it for free here.

I was so proud! I love a good, successful community trip! Get many of the resources mentioned above in this fast food community unit!

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Planning Community Trips for the Year

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Planning community trips was always so stressful for me, at least my first two years teaching. Each month, I'd think I should probably plan a community trip...but only ended up planning a few because other things always came up and I focused on those instead of trying to plan a trip. At the beginning of this year I decided, as a high school life-skills teacher, I need to make sure community trips were part of my curriculum. In August I planned a calendar of community trips I thought we could go on. In the beginning, I wanted to start with something simple, so it was just a short and sweet trip to McDonald's. Once my students had more exposure and were used to going on community trips, I figured they'd be able to handle more which is why towards the end of the school year I have us going to both a store and a nearby fast food restaurant in the same trip. 

 And I have to mention that looks might be deceiving...this is not the same calendar I started out with in August. I would scratch things out and move trips around, but since I like things to look neat, I would then update it and print out a new one. 

I also like having this prepared ahead of time, because I then work on lessons that go with our community theme.

Fast Food Restaurants: For McDonald's and Wendy's we used this fast food unit. We also spent time looking at their websites and their online menus. I created a visual menu from the dollar menu to help my students choose items while staying in their budget as well as a scavenger hunt in case we had some time to kill - you can see those things here. It was also helpful to use our environmental print Fast Food book and worksheets.

Sit Down Restaurant: For Denny's we prepared by reading some books I had about sit-down restaurants. We looked at the Denny's website at their menu, logo, and location. We also practiced by having a restaurant in class with menu items of chips and pretzels. Afterwards, I created this book that my students continue to read. During language, I have my student identify restaurants in their community based on their logos.

Dollar Store: The Dollar Tree website was great to look through and they had cool videos that we showed as well! I also really enjoy that at a dollar store, everything is a dollar, so it makes it easier for students to budget. We practiced picking out items and counting how many items we had to know how many dollars we needed, adding one dollar at the end for the tax. 

Mall trip: Every year before Christmas, my program takes our students to the mall to go shopping for presents and we get to watch a movie and eat at the food court too! We were able to go to the mall's website to get some background knowledge and I printed a map of the mall and we matched logos for the bigger department stores. I blogged about our experience last year here

Stores: Since they were all right next to each other, we went on a trip to ALDI, Five Below, and PetSmart. I had students complete "research projects" like the ones found in my Store Environmental Print packet. The students had to trace the name of the store and then cut and glue items from ads I brought it or ones that we found online of things they could find at those stores. We also went through a PowerPoint of actual stores that I found on Google images, so students could get used to recognizing the logo on actual buildings. The materials I used to teach these three stores you can download here for free. We used this Taking Care of Pets unit to prepare for PetSmart.

Bowling: More details to come in a post soon, but I used this bowling unit to help my students prepare for this trip. Update - read about our bowling preparation and trip here.

Thrift store: I'll admit, I really wanted to play "Thrift Shop" for my students....but even the clean version sounds a little dirty, so I didn't feel comfortable enough doing it. Sad day! I hope to create materials that I can use next time for this trip, but for this time we just went on Google images and talked about the Goodwill logo and how you can buy "good" stuff at Goodwill. We discussed donated and buying things cheaper, and how they have a lot of different things there. My students are excited to look for video games.

Update: Library - see post and materials HERE and Ice Cream trip - we used this unit!

Now, when a new month comes up, I check my community calendar, see if there is any conflicts with the date I suggested and then fill out the necessary paperwork for that event. I don't have to "think" which is SO helpful! :) And therefore we guarantee that we will have a community experience each month.

Need help preparing your students before they go out in the community? Grab this Community Trip bundle and receive 8 different trip units all planned for you!

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Fast Food BINGO + Fishing!

We love to play Bingo in my classroom! But, who doesn't, right? Of course, for fast food month, we had to have a Fast Food Bingo. We also used these words as our vocab words for the month. (I store all of my Bingo boards inside of page protectors in a binder.)

I decided to add a new way to play Bingo and it was a blast! I got a few magnetic fishing games at the dollar tree, added paperclips to our calling cards, and BOOM - we were fishing for our calling cards. My students loved taking a turn being the fisher/caller!

Simple - and tons of extra fun. You can get this Fast Food Bingo set along with a bunch of fast food materials at my TPT store. And I have more fun ways I play Bingo, so stay tuned, I'll share them sometime (Is the suspense just killing you?!).

Do you add any fun twists to your Bingo games?

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McDonald's Breakfast Community Trip

Last month was "Fast Food month" in my classroom. This year I'm trying something new and trying to focus on more functional themes than cutesy elementary themes. Our community trip was to McDonald's. I figured it would be a nice easy trip for the beginning of the year.

Check out this awesome fast food pack available here that you can use to prepare to a fast food restaurant like McDonalds!

Each student had $3.30 to budget. We looked over the menu I created with our options (aka the cheap options) and the amount of money needed for each.

Also, students cut out what they wanted to order so they could use these strip to order verbally, and then pass it on to the cashier. This worked out great for the cashiers because they couldn't always understand my kids. I was so proud of my kids when they ordered and handed over their money!

After they were done eating we went on a scavenger hunt to find things like the bathrooms, napkins, and other signs. It was a great trip!

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Environmental Print - Fast Food Month!

I seriously have a love/hate relationship with my job right now. Anyone else know what I mean?

It's been so much fun planning new lessons/activities/centers/etc for my students and learning new kids and their learning styles and needs. But then there's the behaviors I'm trying to figure out, the aides I'm trying to organize/lead, and the paperwork. Ugh. But blogging about the fun stuff helps me keep a positive attitude and remember why I love teaching.

Onto some fun things - I am planning on doing one community trip a month with my students this year. And this month's field (at the end of the month) will be to a fast food restaurant. So this month's theme is going to be all about fast food. To start us off, I made an environmental print book all about fast food restaurants!

Each page has the predictable text, "I can eat at _____________" and then the restaurant on the page. This makes sure even my non-readers can read.

 Also, each page has adapted pieces that the student can match while reading the book. This helps aid in comprehension and gives the student something concrete to do while reading.

I also created a variety of worksheets including matching the logo, writing the words, finding all of one logo, etc. I hope to start using the worksheets next week and then move onto some menu options at each restaurant. My thought is to have my students choose what restaurant we will go to, so I'm curious to see which one they will pick.

Let me know if you have or know of any other fast food resources I could use this month!
Oh, and you can get this Fast Food book and worksheets on my TPT store :)

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