This week I’m working with my student on identifying and naming different fruits. We read the “I Spy Fruit” adapted book which I shared about last week. The students had to select the correct fruit to match the given color description. This helped the students work on learning and reviewing which food items were considered fruit. This is still a hard concept for a lot of my students.
After the book we did a fun fruit sorting activity. I just found this product on Amazon and thought it would be perfect for my “fruit” theme. It’s called Super Sorting Pie and is by Learning Resources. There are so many different ways you can use this activity. You can work sorting by color or type, counting, or patterning. I used this activity different ways depending on my group and targeted goals.
For some of my younger students or lower functioning students we worked on sorting by color. This was perfect because we practiced saying the color and/or the fruit name. For my students using core boards I had color pictures on the top of the core board and I had the students point to the color picture on their board to match the fruit color. My students using PECS handed me the color picture corresponding to the fruit I was holding up and then after the exchange the student placed the fruit in the pie. Students using AAC systems can request colors or “more” on their device before receiving the piece of fruit. You could have your AAC students work on expanding those utterances such as “yellow banana” or “I found/see yellow banana”.
For other groups, I had my students use a spinner and count out that many fruit pieces and place them in the pie. For example, I told my student he/she needed to find the orange fruit….if the student spun a 3 then he/she needed to add 3 orange fruit to the pie pan in the correct spot. Having a set number can be challenging because they want to add all the fruit to the bowl and not stop at the number they spun.
I also used the number tray and I had the student choose what fruit they wanted and count out the number to match the number in the pie pan. The students can use the tongs while counting out the fruit which makes it fun for the students while working on those fine motor skills. For some reason using the tongs was so funny to my students. At the very end we added the top to the pie and pretended to bake it!
All my groups seemed to really like the pie sorting activity so far. The great thing is with the different choices of how to play the game I will be able to use it multiple times while still having some variety.
Another fruit activity we did was a Fruit Identification Board. Some of you are probably familiar with my identification boards because I make them to go with many of my different therapy themes. It is just an easy go to follow-up activity to use with my students. I made a fruit board, vegetable board, and fruit and veggie combo board which you can download for free – Fruit and Vegetable Identification Boards.
This week I just used the fruit board and I’ll save the vegetable board for next week. For a quick review I have the students name the pictures along each row. If you need to fold over the paper for some of your students who are more distracted that always works. Then give one instruction at a time. “Find the grapes and color them purple”.
You can give the students all the directions or have the students take turns giving each other directions! They love to be in charge!!!
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