Vocational Tasks: Workbasket Wednesday

Maybe I should call this post of Workbasket Wednesday the pizza edition because both tasks I’ve chosen to share are vocational and related to pizza. So you may want a snack to read it–you might be hungry when you are done. Today I want to focus on vocational tasks, but they are vocational (or prevocational) and can be used appropriately with any age to practice a variety of skills besides the vocational activity they are related to.

If you are interested in linking up with Workbasket Wednesday, the directions are at the bottom of the post and I’d love to see your tasks.

Do you have any students who LOVE pizza? I had a teacher I was working with who has a guy who would do any type of work….as long as it was pizza-related. So, she and I were brainstorming all the ways we could build pizza into his work during the day.

Vocational Task 1

One easy vocational task to set up and use, if you make or have a friend at a local pizza place, is constructing pizza boxes. Some local businesses will donate the flat boxes that need to be folded into boxes to hold pizza and some will even work with you to have this be a job for a student. Either way, it’s easy to make a picture task analysis of the steps to set up the boxes and teach the students to assemble them. Once the student can do it independently, they can follow the sequence on their own and you can give them a stack to work on in their work system. This is a great example of a type of task that makes teaching the use of the schedule of the work system early on (instead of just drawers or baskets) really important because the boxes don’t usually fit into drawers and bins. So you would put Pizza Boxes on the schedule and the student would go to a table or station with the stack of cardboard to assemble them and put them in a finished shelf like you see in the picture. My friend Stacy W. from Bright Horizons was kind enough to share these pictures with us.

Vocational Task 2

Another way to practice following directions and sequencing is my new Let’s Build a Pizza set. In this set, the students follow the directions of the pizza order to create the pizza from the crust to sauce (or none), cheese (or none), and other toppings. I set it up so that it could resemble a pizza restaurant or a cooking activity and a great extension would be use the same format to cook pizza during a cooking activity.

I made some simple pizza order cards with visuals of the items with identical cards without them. Then there are more complex cards, blank cards that can be individualized and self-order cards that students (or teachers) choose what they want on their pizza and the students follow the recipe. I set them up so they make the pizza on a pizza pan and I use magnets to hold down the crust. I tried to do the whole pizza with magnets but there are too many layers so they stick, so I had to do Velcro. I gave directions for assembly within the pack. I love this skill to target sequencing and following directions. They have to put the crust down before the sauce and both before the cheese and all of those come before the toppings. I made a task analysis with pictures of the steps to make the pizza to help.

For our guy who loves pizza, I was thinking he can type up pizza orders, he can practice his sight words reading the pizza orders (so I made them lists of ingredients). He also has to find the right size of crust, sauce layer and cheese layer to match the order (small, medium or large). We can even bump it up a bit and have him count the number of toppings, put on specific numbers of toppings, etc. So many skills can be built into these tasks and they can prepare a student to cook and work in a restaurant where he/she needs to assemble dishes. As with all work tasks, first we have to teach the student how to follow the directions but once he is started, it can be put in his work system to practice independently.

You can check out the pack in my TPT store here or clicking on the pictures above. And make sure you check out the other posts that are linked up below for all different work box activities.

Don’t forget to link to Workbasket Wednesday with any post on work systems including tasks or the systems themselves. Just follow the directions below. Don’t have a blog and want to participate? Share your photos on Instagram with the hashtag #WorkbasketWednesday and tag me @autismclassroomnews and I will be sure to share them with the group!

Looking for more ideas on work systems and how they can be used? Check out the links below for more posts. And, I wrote about a book about them! Click on the book to the left for an Amazon Affiliate link (see my disclosure policy for more information about affiliate links). And check out my Pinterest boards for Work Tasks.