Increasingly, severely handicapped students are receiving functional, chronologically age-appropriate training in a wide variety of natural community environments. When instructional personnel utilize this approach, they generally find that instructional materials they have utilized in the past are no longer appropriate. This paper discusses six characteristics of instructional materials and instructional materials adaptations that can be used as decision rules for instructional personnel developing and adapting materials based on a community-based training model. Five examples of instructional materials based on the above are illustrated and described.