My students created a book called "Where's My Mom?" Each book had a textured caterpillar on the cover page. The next two pages said, "That's not my mom." The last page said, "That is my mom. The goal is to match the "mom" butterfly to the caterpillar. I used an Ellison Press to cut the butterflies and caterpillars from textured paper available from APH. It was a good lesson for teaching the concepts - same and different. If you present the caterpillar, matching butterfly, and a non-matching butterfly, the student can find the texture that is different. I continued this way until the butterfly that was left was the "mom" butterfly.
We also made a butterfly from a coffee filter. Some of my students painted their butterfly on the Mini-Lite Box from APH. I used shiny pipe cleaners to make the antennae, and bright colored clothes pins for the body. We used watercolor paints and brushes. Try not to let the filter get too wet, or wait until it dries to add the antennae. Wrap the pipe cleaner around the body, then twist. I used plastic clothes pins, but you could use the wooden pins and paint them.
If you have a student with low vision or CVI (Cortical Visual Impairment), shiny pipe cleaners can be a quick way to highlight pictures or objects.
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I saw an activity like this on Pinterest, but I couldn’t find it again. I have learned to pin or like anything I want to see again. Pinterest is a great place to find ideas and save them with a picture to remember what you have saved. It is a visual list of your "favorites." Each picture is a link to the web page where you found the activity, idea, or picture.
One of the pre-braille skills students need to learn is to discriminate items or textures by touch.
We have an abundance of long file folders in our office, so my goal was to make use of them. I used the embosser to create dot hands and placed them on the folder. I used also used 6 different textured papers/sheets. I placed one of each texture under the hand, then used a Velcro dot in the middle of the hand. The Velcro on the back of the textured squares is larger to make it easier to stick it to the piece on the hand. The object of the activity is to explore the texture under each hand and place its match in the hand.
