The grocery store can be a particularly imposing place for many Autistic people. It combines sensory, social navigation, and executive functioning challenges into one location. Not to mention you might depend on this task to meet your most basic food needs! 

One way to make these trips easier is to work on skills that help us create and follow through on a plan. How can we work on the various skills that go into a successful grocery store experience? AGU is here to help with our series of grocery store-related life skills exercises!

What kinds of skills can we practice when it comes to grocery shopping? Let’s take a closer look!

What do we need in the grocery store? Where do we find it? Does it look different in the packaging from how it looks on a plate? Identifying items is an important part of streamlining the grocery store experience. 

It might seem obvious on the surface, but searching around for every item on your list starts to add up quickly, and combined with additional sensory challenges, can make the experience exponentially more difficult! 

AGU’s grocery store skill exercise library includes both identifying and matching exercises. There is also a scavenger hunt! When it comes to scaffolding grocery store-related lessons, identifying items is a great starting point, too!

Transactions can be a deceptively complicated process. You need to have a sense of how much your items will cost, how you are paying, how much you need to pay, and make sure you have enough with you to get the items you need. A classic example is knowing how much items really cost. 

Our Dollar Up Rounding Series is a helpful way to instill the mindset of rounding up to the nearest dollar when estimating the cost of items. It’s a great way to build a foundation for correctly estimating how your food wants and needs fit into your overall budget. Speaking of which…

Knowing your budget is a skill in its own right, from knowing whether we can afford something to knowing whether it fits into our monthly expenditures. Our grocery store exercise focuses on the building blocks of budget, picking the items that fit within our available resources. It also builds on that skill by having students pick out multiple items to fit within a larger budget.

We hope you will give our grocery store life skill exercises a try! Most of our exercises currently focus on foundational skills. If you would like to see us create more exercises that build on those skills, we would love to hear from you! Let us know what you’re thinking at hello@autismgrownup.com and stay tuned for more updates!