Independent Task Boxes

My name is Sandy Gillam and this is my 8th year as a TSVI (Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments) and my 19th year of teaching overall. My son Liam, who is also my student (age 17, deafblind), loves learning and trying new things. One night, while scrolling through Instagram, I found a teacher talking about how she uses independent task boxes in her classroom. I really loved the idea and wanted to adapt it and make it more specific and accessible for students who are blind/deafblind (Liam). I wanted to create tasks that supported his goals.

Glove practice box that has large print and braille label on side.

Each box includes braille labels, braille and print instructions both, and the materials needed to complete the task. Here is the Amazon link to the boxes we used to put the tasks inside.

Labeled boxes that include glove practice, tie bags, first aid, fingerspelling, slate and stylus.

The list of boxes I have made for him so far:
Glove practice
Liam is not a fan of gloves because it makes it hard to feel things well and they are hard to put on. But gloves are something we sometimes need for safety, work and for weather. For this box, he practices putting on different types of gloves (plastic, rubber, winter, etc..). After he became proficient with that task, we added extension activities such as completing activities with gloves on such as making recipes (that experience shown below) and washing windows.

Inside of glove practice box has winter gloves and several disposable gloves, rubber and plastic.

Rubber, plastic, and winter gloves.
Direction sheets in print and braille for gloves practice that state: Practice putting on each pair of gloves. When finished, put the items back in the box and put them in the finished area.

Fingerspelling practice
Fingerspelling clearly, is an important skill used for communication when your first language is American Sign Language. This box contains little braille strips of words that are motivating for him that he can use to practice fingerspelling clearly.

Slate and Stylus Practice
This box includes a slate and stylus and a little booklet of braille words for him to copy. The words are typically words that are meaningful to Liam or funny. Eventually we could make this more challenging and give him real life tasks to complete on the slate.

First Aid
We started simple with this one. This box focuses on washing, putting on ointment and a bandaid on a small cut and trying to be clean while doing so. We made it fun by adding a red washable marker to create fake blood. This one has many options for learning and practicing more first aid skills as he progresses.

Tie Bags
This box contains different type of bags to use for practicing tying a bag shut (ie: grocery bag, garbage bag, etc.).

Money
This box has different tasks inside that give Liam the opportunity to work with real paper and coin money and real-life grocery scenarios and prices.

Other future ideas we have for him include vocabulary practice, tying shoes and tools.

Extension Activity
After Liam had practiced putting on gloves for a couple of weeks, he began to get the hang of it. I often remind him about the purpose of each task box, and one of the objectives of the “gloves” task box was that for food preparation, sometimes gloves would be needed. I found a new recipe for him to try that I knew would be a little messy and sticky and a good thing to try with food gloves on. The recipe was to make Greek yogurt apple dip. He loved it!