Summer School!

This summer we offered 5 weeks of summer school for our Swanky Swine employees.  Our goal was to offer our special needs students an opportunity to use their summer break to develop their vocational and life skills.  Every week we spend our classroom time talking about character development, nutrition, recipes and grocery planning and then we go on several field trips where we apply this knowledge to the real world.

One of our first trips was to Publix grocery store where the students did a Supermarket Challenge.  Grocery shopping is an important life skill. Our first task was to familiarize everyone with where things typically were. What would you find in the produce section? Where are hot dogs? What is the difference between bread in the bakery and in the aisle?

Each student was given a list of products and they had to work in teams to find each item and record the aisle and the price.  They spent a lot of time crisscrossing across the store and eventually they were able to find everything.  It was a great exercise.

After the activity was complete we did shopped for the ingredients we needed to make our lunch.

We’ve been doing a lot of cooking. The students love following recipes and making their own lunch.  So far we’ve made macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, potato salad, watermelon salsa, black bean salsa, squash, corn on the cob, zucchini  salad, BBQ Chicken and fruit salad.  Cooking is a not only an important life skill but also a great way to practice math, motor skills, and following directions.

Here are some of the delicious meals the students have made for themselves:

Exercise is an important part of every healthy lifestyle so we try to schedule some of that into every week as well.  We swim, walk at the park, swing and play catch.

Our first two weeks of summer school have been a lot of fun for everyone. We can’t wait for all of the fun we have planned over the next 3 weeks! We hope everyone is having a great summer!