Animated Step-by-Steps®: Blueberry Cobbler, anyone?

Monday, May 22, 2017

Blueberry Cobbler, anyone?

I’ve just posted a Blueberry Cobbler Recipe on the Teachers Pay Teachers site.

This resource is available in three formats: Regular (no symbol-support), SymbolStix (n2y), and Picture Communication Symbols (Tobii/Dynavox).

Although this is an easy to assemble recipe, it does have many ingredients which can make the group lesson quite long. I typically pre-measure and pre-package many of the ingredients (‘cooking show’ style) to minimize the deadly ‘wait time’ that can cause a potentially great group activity to unravel.

When working in a school for students with physical disabilities, the Occupational Therapists were more than happy to work one-on-one with a student to pre-measure and package the ingredients for the class lesson (scheduled for later in the day). This strategy offered a host of functional fine motor opportunities … opening and closing containers, pouring, stabilizing with the non dominant hand, using both hands to open a zip lock bag, using an index finger to seal the zip lock bag, writing the contents on the zip lock bag. Depending upon the nature of the class, measured items can be packaged individually or combined, e.g., all the ‘dry' ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt) assembled in one bag. During the actual group lesson the labeled bag provides an additional literacy opportunity for the group.

Teachers also like to incorporate math in their lesson by creating a mystery jar/bowl of blueberries. A chart is used to document each student's guess inviting students to guess/predict how many blueberries are in the jar/bowl. The class would eventually count out the blueberries. "There were 178 blueberries in the jar. Let's look at our prediction chart. Who had the closest number?"

The Blueberry Cobbler Animated Step-by-Step recipe pairs well with a variety of Blueberry themed picture books.