Teaching job skills to your learners with special needs before they enter the workforce is a great way to ensure that they will gain employment. For this lesson, your young scholars will become the school's very own mail or delivery...

Gaia Squarci's photo essay, Broken Screen, turns viewers attention to the challenges faced by those with visual impairments. After viewing the images, class members discuss why they believe the photographer structured the album as she did.

Maybe the idea of putting placemats on trays doesn't sound that great, but it is, especially if you have a physical disability or are visually impaired. This task is one that can be used in a vocational setting and helps develop skills...

For learners with low vision, the ability to identify colors is an important skill that will help them identify people and places. Groups of brightly colored objects are placed around the room. The child is then given a colored paper and...

Teaching a child with low or no vision how to read is the same as teaching a sighted child how to read — it all starts with letter recognition. This is a simple way to provide your learners with an opportunity to practice reading and...

Turn the act of following directions into a fun and engaging game! Especially designed for students with cognitive or intellectual disabilities, this lesson plan uses a game format as a natural reinforcer. Write a set of directions onto...

Have your learners with special needs practice cooperative work skills, teamwork, and packaging. The kids will form an assembly line. Each pupil will add an item to a paper bag and then hand it off to the next person until the bag is...

Teach one-to-one correspondence, fine motor, and counting skills to your learners with visual disabilities. Included are a set of activity suggestions, which are useful when teaching a variety of different early math skills. Braille,...

Vocational training activities are extremely important for learners with intellectual or physical disabilities. Here is a great idea that will help your class become skilled at money handling, basic economic concepts, interpersonal...

First, next, and last, the elements of chronological order. In every story or text one can find a series of events that occur one after the other. To help learners with visual impairments conceptualize chronological order, this...

When you are blind, your hands become your eyes, so learning how to discriminate between various objects through touch is a very important skill. Make a memory game by gluing common items onto cardstock. The kids feel, identify, and...

"Hi, how are you? My name is___." Seems simple enough but it's not always that easy to recall and relate factual information about yourself. Learners with multiple disabilities practice memorizing and relaying personal information about...

Mixtures and solutions are different; one can be separated fairly easily and the other cannot. This hands-on experiment was written specifically for learners with visual impairments or blindness. They will use lemonade and trail mix to...

Playing pretend with real objects or concepts is a wonderful way for learners to make object-to-action connections, as well as practice daily living skills. Learners with visual and intellectual disabilities use a wide variety of real...

Board games are great for building social skills and for fostering recreation and leisure skills! Here, you'll find an image and a brief description of how you can make a tactile version of the game Sorry for your blind or...

Being able to give positive reinforcers to a child starts with knowing what the child likes. Intended for children with blindness, this lesson gives you a way to determine the types of music your learners like best. You are given a...

Children who are blind need to constantly be engaged in building conceptual understandings of the world around them. This activity will help them grasp the concept of shape, identify shapes, and consider shapes as they are used to...

Go on a shopping trip to practice estimation, price value, and shopping skills. The class heads off to the market to purchase several items for the activity. While they are there, they discuss the cost of various foods and even...

What to wear today; such a vexing question. Spend some time introducing the names, fabrics, types, colors, and functions of various articles of clothing to your class. Each child will take turns asking each other what they are wearing....

Bingo is a super fun game and can be used to reinforce a vast number of recognition skills. These bingo cards are prepared by constructing nine squares, each delineated with raised Wikki Stix or gluedyarn and containing a...

It is so important for learners with multiple disabilities to learn how to communicate for both social and functional reasons. Each child will choose a topic from the list and generate five questions related to that topic. They'll split...

Sometimes the simplest ideas foster a lot of different skills. To boost social skills, group participation, identifying others by name, and dressing skills, learners play the hat game. They take turns wearing a hat while...

Oftentimes children or teens with one or more disability are reluctant to participate in whole-group activities. Foster good participation, verbal expression, and social skills through daily circle time activities. Each day you and...

Get out those scrabble tiles and a braille tape labeler because today we are playing a build-a-word game! Label several sets of scrabble tiles using the braille labeler, place them in a box, and have children take turns pulling letter...