The more opportunities we can find to teach, practice, and review community and safety signs in our classrooms, the more prepared our students will be in the community. This leads to greater independence and safety awareness. Read on for 5 different ways you can target these critical life skills in your special education program.
how to integrate community signs activities
Our students often need a high level of repetition in order to learn and master skills. Incorporating this practice across the school day is an ideal way to achieve the high level of practice students need.
Choose at least 3 times a day to touch on community signs across the schedule—for example, morning meeting, centers, task boxes, or independent work time. This builds in varied practice as well as lots of repetition.
Community sign of the week
Choose a community or safety sign to highlight and directly teach about each week. Depending on your students, you may want to stay on the same sign for 2 weeks or even a month. It all depends on how much practice your students need.
We start the day by working on this community sign. The easiest way for us to do it is during morning meeting. We have a bulletin board in our morning meeting area dedicated to the sign.
Using this bulletin board, we go over the sign and what it looks like in the community. Students are able to practice the sign in a variety of ways:
- Picture of the sign
- Label of the sign
- Definition… What does it mean when we see that sign?
- Sorting community sign picture cards while practicing yes or no
- Reading the sign label in different fonts and writing
There’s also an interactive book that goes with each community sign to help students recognize the sign in a variety of community-based settings.
target Community signs in ela centers
Community and safety signs can easily be integrated into reading centers. Here are a few examples to get you started.
For reading centers, you can easily add books for all levels to use. Here are some examples:
I love this book by Tana Hoban. The book includes real photos of the signs in the community. While there are no words, it builds in opportunities to match pictures of picture icons to the sign on each page. You could also add in language opportunities by talking about or describing where you would see the sign, discussing what you would do if you saw the sign, etc. Read more about how I use this book here.
For students who benefit from interactive and adapted books in center activities, use interactive books like these that come in the community signs of the week sets.
What I love about these adapted and interactive books is they can be used and extended in so many ways. Students who are at the pre-readiness level can spend time recognizing, matching, and labeling the signs. Other students may answer WH questions about the text and scenarios.
Also included in the community sign of the week sets are activities to practice describing, inferring, and WH questions with students. These are great activities to use at an adult-led center. The questions and prompts are included, so the center can easily be run by a para, therapist, or parent volunteer.
In writing centers, we use the worksheets that are part of the community signs of the week sets.
incorporate community signs in math centers
Here are some ideas on how to target community and safety signs in math centers:
- Compare signs: Match, sort, and compare signs by shape and colors.
- Graph signs: Tally up how many and which signs you find on a walk, a virtual field trip, a book, etc., and then create a graph. Discuss how many of each sign was found, which has more or less, etc.
- Measure signs and then order them into a specific order such as shortest to tallest.
- Create and extend patterns and sequences using pictures of signs found in the community.
Add community sign activities into independent work
Independent work or task bins is a great time to integrate community signs activities. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Have students label signs either by matching the label or writing the label under the sign.
signs in computer activities
Find ways to combine practicing safety and community signs activities with technology. Have students type blurbs about signs they’ve seen, type descriptions for the signs, etc.
You can also use computer activities like Boom Learning. Here are some to check out:
No matter how you choose to target community signs, be sure to find multiple times a day to practice, review, and reinforce this critical skill.
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