Teach your students to dial important phone numbers on a cell phone. Skip the velcro!
Still using a number strip with velco pieces to teach your students an important phone number? Time to update your practices! Help your student learn to dial important phone numbers by practicing on a real cell phone or a mock cell phone keypad.
No judgement here – we used to do that, too. We changed our teaching strategy pretty soon after attending a two-day training with Dr. Patrick McGreevy, one of the authors of Essential for Living curriculum and assessment.
A nugget of wisdom from his workshop –
Why would we spend time teaching students to sequence numbers on a number line rather than to begin by teaching the student to dial the number on a phone? It’s more practical and useful to spend that time developing a functional skill. What benefit does the velcro number-matching strategy bring the student, especially if it takes several weeks or months to teach it to independence?
We started teaching our students to dial using a printed version of a keypad and on a cell phone. It’s much more fun to practice on an actual cell phone, especially when your new skill helps you get ahold of someone you love. Practicing on a real phone wasn’t always possible, so we also created a low-tech simulation activity.
Here are a few strategies you can use en route to teaching independence with this skill.
Touch Sample – Touch Keypad
Give your student the printed phone number and the keypad. Teach your student to move a tracker (or his left hand) over each digit and press the number on the keypad, one by one.
See Sample – Touch Keypad
Your student may be able to fade out the use of a tracking item. This step may not be necessary, decide the importance of fading to this step as opposed to just working on memorization
Fade Sample
Present all numbers except for the last. Hide it and see if your student can remember the correct number. If not, unhide it and let your student use it as a prompt. Keep practicing until your student can do it without peeking. Then, hide the next to last number until your student can do the whole number.
Dialing Independently
Keep practicing! Be sure your student knows who the number belongs to.
“Dial Mom’s number.”
Try teaching numbers for other important people in your student’s life.
Once we got on a roll it was hard to stop. Sending pictures to share your location, using voice to text, accessing your contacts page, and learning to pull up a document with your personal information in an emergency are all benefits of having access to a cell phone. Keep an eye out for some fun and life changing extensions to this activity!
Check out the Cell Phone template and prompting supports on our TeachersPayTeachers store. The cell phone template comes bundled with our Kitchen Appliances Worksheets – bring number matching and recognition to a whole new, more meaningful, level! Click the image below to go straight to this activity in our TpT store.
CLICK HERE to check out our post on Number Matching & Identification using Kitchen Appliances.
