More than a decade later, we still try to create whatever we need at home rather than to pay the hefty price tag for supplies from a company that targets special needs populations. It saves us paying grossly inflated prices, and often it means we can have an item within a day or even a few hours, rather than waiting for an order to be processed and the item shipped from a great distance.
We are gearing up to teach the Bug how to fold laundry, and so we are going to make ourselves a DIY shirt folding board out of cardboard and duct tape. While we may decide we'd like to have a more durable, plastic board in future, for now we want to just give this tool a trial.
I also like that by making our own shirt board we can customize the size to best suit his needs. We can also have several different boards - either in different sizes, or just multiple board so we can demonstrate or the other kids can fold along with the Bug - for the same cost. The cardboard is free, and there's more than enough tape on the roll to do a couple of boards.
In a similar vein, I've been taking advantage of teachable moments to create little lessons for the Bug. We have turned a number of his keen interests - like the rides at the carnival or an upcoming birthday party - into folders on Proloquo2Go. I've used these opportunities to do all manner of teaching - from showing him the ins and outs of the program or how to create his own buttons, to modelling conversational phrases he might find useful. Most recently I caught him singing a Bruno Mars song and turned that into a living skills lesson.
So how about you? Do you have any DIY teaching tools for your autistic child or student?
Crayon graphic courtesy of PublicDomainPictures/Pixabay - public domain
