Yesterday I told you about my hair pulling frustrating moment of trying to teach the concept of thankful. Well I bit off a little more than I could chew and took on teaching wants vs. needs. Again a great and necessary concept to teach but it was hard for my kids! They did really well though. We did tons of examples and these word sorts were the perfect accompaniment. I think it was really good for my kids to talk about what would happen if we didn’t have these things. When I asked what would happen if we didn’t have soap – they were all like, “Ewww – we would be stinky!” Too funnY!

I got the great freebie – yea I said freebie – from Tunstall’s Teaching Tidbit’s (love her blog!). This freebie – Thanksgiving Poems, Chants, and Performance is loaded with awesome resources. I used her wants and needs sorts and they really helped teach my students this concept.

(don’t mind my dirty board!) These are the definitions we developed for needs and wants. Again kids with autism have a hard time using language to explain things (see yesterday’s post) – so I needed to make sure we did tons of examples and categorizing to help my kids understand the concepts.

We made class posters sorting ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ and talked about each one.

Then they made their own sorts on their own.

We put our big posters in the hall!

Thanks so much Reagan for a great activity!