Teaching Number Matching and Identification using Kitchen Appliances
Preparing meals for yourself is the ultimate sign of adulthood. Even if it’s just a grilled cheese and a can of tomato soup, safely using the microwave, stovetop, and oven can mean the difference between independence and perpetual reliance on a caregiver. If you can’t make a decent meal for yourself, someone will always have to do it for you. We vote this is a time-worthy life skill!
You can use kitchen appliances, like the stove or microwave, to teach number matching, number identification, and independent living.
Where to Begin
Unless your student wants to eat the same three meals day in and day out, the best option is teaching this skill with generalization in mind from the beginning. This means we’ll avoid teaching a cooking routine where we walk through the steps of cooking a specific meal, for now at least! We want to break down some basic cooking skills and teach these skills to mastery across a variety of equipment and foods from the beginning.
For this post, we will stick to using the timer and setting the oven temperature. It might even be the fun part, where we can rely on some natural interest during instruction. Don’t ask me why, but people seem to like pushing buttons!
The best part about starting here is you are not only teaching an important life skill, but you are also working on number matching and number identification within a meaningful context. Sitting at the table and matching laminated number cards gets boring, real quick! So let’s mix it up and also design our teaching with skill generalization in mind from the very start.
Ideas for Teaching
When we teach our students to set the timers or temperatures on our kitchen appliances, we are going to teach them a process. It’s going to result in a more useful skill than just prompting the student to match numbers. Imagine you are cooking, you would probably reference a cooking time or cooking temperature from a recipe or the back of the food packaging. We’re going to teach our student to do this, too!
When we prompt a process, we need to be very intentional about the prompts we use. Over here at TeachingTheirWay, we work hard to get rid of our bad habits like using too many verbal directions or pointing to things for our students.
We try, from the start, to help our students pay attention to the materials in front of them and listen to the “cues within the materials.” This helps us more easily fade our prompts and decreases dependency on another person.
In Summary – Take a step back and set up the materials support the student. We are there to help them learn to respond to the materials and get our of their way as quickly as possible.
Strategies for Teaching
Many of our students do best when we give them plenty of repeated practice when learning something new. It can be hard to provide lots of practice when using an actual oven or the microwave. Popping popcorn or roasting veggies keep this activity fun and meaningful, but we may also want to pull this skill away from the actual appliances and practice during seated work or structured independent work times.
This is the part where we have you covered. Take a peek at our Kitchen Appliances Worksheets in our TeachersPayTeachers store. Check back often as we post some ideas for recipes to keep this activity fresh for you and your students!
Since we are on the topic of learning to match and identify numbers, follow the link below for more ideas related to teaching number identification within meaningful activities.
CLICK HERE to check out our Cell Phone post for more ideas!
