My independent work station is favorite activities for my students. It’s amazing to watch them grow more and more independent and begin to work on these tasks all by themselves. Also, my students find so much satisfaction and pride in being able to do tasks on their own too!
Plus, I know a lot of classrooms are short on aides during this school year. After teaching your students how to use an independent work station, you shouldn’t even need any aides to run it so you can utilize them where needed!
In my classroom, I use the Sterilite shoe storage containers. I also use student strips and work box labels for easy organization! As far as what to put inside the boxes, you can use random things you can probably find in your classroom or at the dollar store to create the tasks! If you need more space and have small tasks, you can use index card holders (for task cards) or magazine file boxes for file folders or folder worksheets!
You do not need 100 work tasks to start the classroom set up for independent work station. A teacher can easily start with 10-20 boxes of activities and add more as you think of them. A great way to collect items for task boxes is to ask family and friends to donate supplies. You can also create a Donor’s Choose project to get classroom funding!
You should have tasks that your students can complete independently. Sure, you want to challenge them a little bit, but the overall goal for this station is independence and following a schedule. These are VERY IMPORTANT life and vocational skills!
Look around your classroom and see what you can find to make into tasks before you go out and buy stuff. You might be surprised what you find! Think of the things you do everyday and make it a independent work station:
Want to know about functional life skills, you can check out this blog post!
Whatever tasks you have your students do, make sure to teach your students to put their work back in the box completed and DO NOT let them see you take it apart. That devalues their work, and who wants to do work if they know it will just be taken apart? Plus, it’s not realistic. If you are completing a task on the job, you better not take it apart after you’ve finished it!
A weekly master schedule is your best friend! I scheduled my student’s boxes so that no two boxes were done on the same day, so that the student schedules could be set up in the morning by an aide and be ready to go.
Sometimes students repeated tasks in a week, but for the most part, they had a variety of 6-12 boxes that they complete weekly (some students don’t do work tasks on various days due to therapies). This also made data easy to compile because each day of the week had the same boxes.
Looking for reasons why you need Independent work Stations, read this post!
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