Making Money IEP Goals More Functional

When teaching money, where do you start? Coins, right? Well...maybe not.

One of my pet peeves was getting a new freshman's IEP and seeing that one of their goals was to identify a penny or to recognize the value of a quarter. This happened ALL of the time. Why did this bother me? These skills of recognizing coins and their values simply aren't functional anymore for these students. If they still aren't able to identify coins at 14 years old, they need to move onto something else.

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Teaching Students to Shop Smart - Finding Which Costs Less

When shopping, it is important for students to be able to spend their money wisely and choose the item that costs less. After my students are able to find items on their grocery list, I like to challenge them to look at the prices and pick the brand that is cheaper.

When teaching students to determine which item costs less, I follow a three step process to help them learn this important skill.

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Winter Themed LA, Math, and Crafts: Lessons for Special Education

Hello winter! They say it's going to get to -2 degrees today. I had to shovel our driveway yesterday. Brrr. In fact, I'm drinking hot chocolate right now. Winter is indeed here so it's time to bring some winter activities in the classroom!

Let's get started with some winter journals!

These journals are my absolute favorite as they reach all of the needs of my students. A classroom sample provides sentence starters and three errorless options. The options are errorless because so many of my students are concerned about getting the right answer that they always look for help. I want them to be successful and these journals help them be confident about their writing abilities.

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Visual Task Cards for Special Education

I absolutely love using task cards for my special education students. They are easy to store, easy to use, and great for practicing a wide variety of skills! They can be used during direct instruction, for independent work, and in TEACCH / work boxes. Plus, I've created my task cards to be used for non-readers as well as readers so they can be used by any students in my classroom who are working on those skills.

I have a range of money task cards, great for my higher level students. And I have functional life skill cards, great for both low to high students, including simple concepts such as male or female and more complicated concepts, such as determining if food goes in the cabinet, freezer, or fridge.

Check out this video to see all of my task card sets and to hear about how I use them in my classroom.

Here's all of the task card topics that I currently use! Click on the picture to check out each task card set.

Want them all? I have two great money saving options for you!!

Buy all 9 (non-money task cards) in this HUGE BUNDLE!

Interested in the 4 money task cards? They are bundled HERE. 

(Australian money task cards are also available here.)

Do you use task cards in your classroom? Do you have another idea for task cards? I'd love to help you out, so let me know what you need. I'm sure my students would benefit from it as well!

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Classroom ATM Machine and Entering PINs

You might remember a while back I asked for advice on what to use for a credit card swipe machine for my students to practice on and enter their PINs and you came up with a lot of great suggestions! One of those was this Zillionz ATM machine...but it was a little expensive! I think because it probably isn't sold in stores anymore. So I gave up on that decided to start asking stores if they had any old swipe machines they wanted to get rid of! LOL I asked once and then chickened out.

I had just about given up when....I found this in our school store (where teachers/parents donate items for students to buy with their hard earned school bucks)! 

Yup, that's the same Zillionz machine that Sincerely, School Psychologist recommended on my facebook post! I think I begged one of my students to buy it for me for $4 of his "thunderbucks." That sounds a lot better than $139 :)

Now, for how I use it in my classroom. We use the Banking for Non-readers curriculum and we have pretend debit cards that we use for practice. This machine turns on with any card inserted, so that was perfect because each student could use their own card! Whenever we got to a lesson that used the ATM machine (or depositing money into the bank or buying something with a debit card, etc), we used our ATM machine!

Now for the PINs, since each of my students had created their own PIN, I was afraid this would be a challenge. However, I looked up the instructional manual online and found you can change the PIN by entering the current PIN, pressing enter twice and then entering the new PIN. So I would walk around like a crazy person dedicated teacher, and change the PIN for each student. Why, yes, I did memorize each one of my students' PINs, that's not weird, right??

As you can see, you can insert pretend money as well! I was also very excited about this feature (I may or may not have been jumping up and down with excitement as I was figuring all this out). The machine has no idea of the amount, but that's okay.

I feel like this ATM has added a lot to our banking lessons. It seems so much more realistic, and I know that my students can enter their PINs and use a machine that is similar to a real ATM machine. Plus, it's a lot of fun to deposit money! (Withdrawing money just opens the drawer, but I have been known to load it with the correct amount they were withdrawing so that each student could withdrawal $20...)

A huge downside to this ATM was the volume with no controls. It was LOUD. Seriously, all caps necessary, LOUD! My ears were ringing after playing with it for a while. So, I filled the volume holes with putty and taped purple plastic over it...and that at least helped a little bit. My students didn't seem to mind the noise anyway, so that's really all that matters! 

It definitely isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than my students sliding their debit cards in the air or on their paper and entering their PINs on a calculator... :) If you are looking for one to use in your classroom, this ATM looks like the same thing just in different colors, and is just under $30 (or this smaller ATM by the same company, a little different but under $8!). Do you use anything else to practice skills like this? I'd love to hear what you use!

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