Community trip - Bowling unit for Special Education

Last month our community trip was to go to a bowling alley. Before we went I wanted to make sure my students understood the basics of bowling as well as the social skills needed for bowling, so we had some fun during our resource class exploring these concepts.

First, we went through a coloring book.

special education bowling community trip

This book has descriptions of different bowling terms (strike, spare, gutter ball) as well as concepts like waiting for friends and cheering for our friends. We went over this as a class and made it into a following directions activity as well (Such as color the pins red, color the shirt blue, etc).

I also threw in some math concepts, such as this number matching 1-10 cut and paste activity.

And also a money worksheet where students have to color in the amount of money needed to buy each item that you might find at the bowling alley. I'm sneaky hiding these math skills into fun bowling worksheets :)

Then we had this social skills game that we used two different ways. To introduce I passed out the green cards to students. I then read the blue card and if the student thought their answer fit, they told me what their card said. After we went through the activity as a class, I had students work on these individually as a matching or memory-type of game.

Of course we played some bowling Bingo too :)

As for our actual bowling experience, it went great! I was a little nervous when some students would step just about over the line into the slippery lane, but luckily no one fell! Also, we were right by the center so when we had balls that were rolling way too slow we were able to walk up and grab them which was really helpful. And check out that high five. That was all natural (aka we didn't tell them to high five and I didn't stage it - which I do sometimes so I can use the picture as a teaching tool) and I am SO proud of that high five and he's proud of his strike! :)