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Activity and strategy

What Are You Thankful For?

Fun Thanksgiving idea and activity for children who are blind or visually impaired, including students with multiple disabilities

Thanksgiving is a great time to expand beyond the topics of turkeys, pilgrims and pie.  This idea uses real objects and tactile symbols to help students illustrate what they are thankful for.

Items Needed:

  • Objects, partial objects, and tactile representations of objects or activities
  • Braille/large print
  • Paper

Procedure

  1. Begin by talking about what it means to be “thankful”. What do we mean when we say “Thank you”? What are the things that make us say “thank you” in our hearts? 
  2. Generate a list of things that the children are thankful for. This can be done individually, in small groups, or as a whole class. Ideas can be recorded through audio files, or written down in print or braille.
  3. Find ways to represent the things that they are grateful for. A bit of leaves, pinecones, etc. may stand for “being outside”, a bathing suit may represent being grateful for going swimming, a dog collar or swatch of fur may represent a favorite pet.
  4. Support the children to create individual tactile books telling what they are grateful for. Each page should include a representation, real object, photograph or drawing of what they are thankful for.  Add labels or text in print and braille.  Use a loose-leaf notebook or metal rings to hold the pages together.  

Variations

  1. Create a bulletin board for the whole class with one example of what each student is grateful for.
  2. Make a single book for the whole class.
Toys embedded on triwall cards with braille labels
Toys embedded on tri-wall cards with braille labels
thanksgiving collage
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