Let's Get Cooking: The Use of Video Modeling to Teach Cooking to Students with Autism

A goal of special education is to give individuals the opportunity to build the necessary skills for living life as independently as possible. Independent living skills include such skills as doing laundry, using modes of transportation (e.g., trolley, bus) to get from place to place, and learning to cook. Cooking can be a challenging life skill to teach and learn, due to the complexity of recipes and varying language levels of written recipes. This product of this project is a simple cookbook entitled Let???s Get Cooking - A Beginners Guide to Cooking Great Meals! The cookbook provides recipes for five breakfast choices, five lunch choices, five dinner choices, and five snacks. The recipes are all presented with clear steps for completion. Within this cookbook are grocery lists for each chapter, which indicate the recipe or recipes for which the ingredient will be used. To promote maximum accessibility for any reader or user, each chapter also has a utensil list, with a photo of each utensil. This cookbook contains explicit instructions for creating a video model, including an example video model created by the author. All video models are linked to a Quick Response (QR) code. The purpose of the code is for any individual or class using the cookbook to be able to scan the QR code, which takes the user to the video model. Instructions for how to create a video model and link it to a QR code also included. This helps promote independence by eliminating the need for prompting through a recipe. This cookbook is intended for use within classrooms as well as community and home settings.Educatio