Skip to content
Activity and strategy

Restaurant Book with Tactile Symbols

Create your own book of tactile symbols to enable students with multiple disabilities to order their own food at a restaurant.

One of my students is in the district’s program for individuals over the age of 18.  This young man is nonverbal with no vision. With him, I go into the home or community with another teacher, therapist, or outside agency. In an effort to help him be more independent, we previously made him a grocery store book. This helped him as he bought the groceries that were specific to his needs. Hhis mother and I have now collaborated on a restaurant book. We decided to use some of the items from his niece’s play food basket as he is familiar with those, having played with her and the food items. We have been practicing pairing the plastic food items with the real food, so that he is learning to associate them and make the connection.

Our goal is for him to go into the restaurant and order his own food. We will be trying it out next week when we go to McDonald’s. We decided to made the chicken nuggets a “large chicken nuggets” to alert the employee the size of his meal. as well as to make it generic enough to work anywhere chicken nuggets are on the menu.   We are now trying to figure out how to represent quesadillas.  Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Materials

  • play food
  • card board
  • silicon (works better than glue for this young man)
  • gorilla glue (worked great as additions to the pizza…i.e. cheese)
  • Tactile connections (The gray background was suggested by his speech therapist, to help him not to confuse them with the other symbols we’ve made so far.)
  • plastic shapes
  • rubber shapes
Tactile Symbols of Chicken Nuggets and French Fries
Tactile symbols of chicken nuggets and French fries
Tactile Symbol of a hamburger
Tactile symbol of a hamburger
Tactile symbols of Coke and flautas
Tactile symbols of Coke and flautas
Tactile symbol of pizza
Tactile symbol of pizza
Collage of creating a restaurant book with tactile symbols for learners who are blind with additional disabilities
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
textured craft of eclipse with a sun and a moon that can cover the sun
Blog

The Incredible Edible Eclipse

Beaded labyrinth being explored by a student
Blog

Concepts Learned with a Circular Labyrinth

circuitmachine
Blog

Creating Tactile Graphics & Other Adapted Materials Using the Cricut