How A School Store Promotes Special Education Life Skills Instruction

I am excited to introduce this week’s guest blogger, Maureen from Spoonful of Sped. She is here to talk all about creating a school store and how to embed life skills instruction!

Making work experiences for students with significant disabilities meaningful can be a challenging task. One way to do this is by implementing a school store. Students purchase items from after earning a paycheck. This may sound hard to implement but it’s easier than you think- check out these 3 areas to get started!

Get families involved in the school store

Get information from families before you begin implementing a banking/money management system in your class. Find out what skills the families are most interested in their students’ learning. Design your program and school store around this. For example, if the majority of families are interested in using debit cards/pin memorization, this could be something you integrate into your school store design.

After sharing with families about the school store and incorporating their feedback, ask for donations of items for the students to purchase. Sometimes, families may have items headed to a donation center anyway that may be great items for incentivizing student task completion to earning their pay.

Ideas of potential items to have in the store include puzzles, fidgets, water bottles, school spirit wear, stickers, coloring tools, action figures, snacks, and drinks. You know your students best so add what’s special to them! I’ve created a sample letter you can send to families. It’s free and you can get it here.

Make money visible for students

Decide if your students will utilize a mock bank account model or perhaps play money. If using the mock bank account model, have students check their “account” weekly after deposits are made and then use a check or debit card to make purchases from the store.

We have students use wallets (or zipper pouches) to store their money and they can choose at the end of each week to make a purchase or save for the following. It teaches money management and basic budgeting skills. Students can either store these in the classroom or take them with them.

Delegate school store tasks to the students

Have students take an active role in managing the exchange of money. When using tangible money, we have a play cash register and a student runs this each Friday. They work on collecting money, simple money math, and making change. We use this one in our school store. Something like this might be a bit more age appropriate for high school/post grad students and has the added skill of a combination lock on the outside but either work great.

Check your local Facebook marketplace for free or cheap options as well. We had a student who loved this job so much they’d ask every week!  If using a mock bank account model, you could have someone be the bank teller and review the account information with each student every week.

Make students responsible for the inventory and restocking of the store items. Make a dedicated area for the school store in your classroom or building and price each item whether on the item itself or in price differentiated bins. A weekly school job that students could do earlier in the week is counting the number of items in each category or price range, determining if there are enough based on a given criteria and restocking low stock items. Check out this resource for some sample items to use to support store management.

Conclusion

The major takeaway is that this doesn’t have to be a ginormous undertaking and can start small. The first version I did was on a cart with 3 bins of treats, the cash register and wallets. Be creative and use what you have! After implementing this, you’ll see growth in responsibility and student understanding of the connection between working and earning money. Plus families love how practical this is!