student project: boo bag edition

a little about this project

During the month of October, our students sell, assemble, and deliver Boo Bags to staff in our building. We love finding ways for our students to apply and generalize the life skills we work on within our classroom. This project gives our students a fun and hands-on way to work on:

• counting money
• fine motor skills (hole-punching tags, tying bags)
• filling orders
• counting quantities
• sorting
• communication
• navigating the building

Each boo bag contains one salty snack and two small sweet treats. We survey our staff to determine what items will be most popular. Be mindful of allergies!

the steps

• Once you determine the details of your own Boo Bag project, like when orders are due and how much you’ll charge, send out an email to staff explaining the process. An example of the email we send to our staff can be found via google docs here.
• Print tags for staff to fill out with their order. You can make your won tags or use the tags in my TPT product. The first year we did this project, we had staff fill out a google form and then students filled out the tags. We were blown away with more than 300 boo bag orders and decided it would be best to have staff fill out their own tags this year. Do whatever is best for your students!
• We have students start decorating bags right away. These white bags have been great and come out to about 8 cents/bag (please note pricing may have changed since this post was written). We use a mixture of dot markers and halloween stickers. Michaels also has some cute stickers this time of year!
  • pro tip: As students decorate bags, have students group them in sets of 10. This will save you LOTS of time when you need to determine how many you have left to make 🙂
• Have students count the money, count orders, and make a shopping list. We typically find the best prices at Sam’s Club. We have been fortunate enough to make this a Community Based Instruction (CBI) field trip and bring students to help purchase the supplies.
• Use the visuals in my TPT product to help students fill the bags.

• Hole punch tags and add string. These hole punchers are great for students building fine motor skills.
• Tie bags and attach tags
• Deliver bags- we like to divide the bags by where they are located in the building.

Our staff look forward to this each year and so does our classroom. I hope you can use all or parts of this idea this fall with your own students!

kelsey

This post includes affiliate links. Thank you so much for supporting my small business.