Hands and Eyes Newsletter
ART AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES FOR STUDENTS WITH VISION IMPAIRMENTS AND THEIR FRIENDS
NOVEMBER 1998 HOLLY COOPER, M.S.
Next to Christmas and Halloween, Thanksgiving has always been a great favorite of mine, and was as a child.
(It’s too bad the really fun holidays are clustered so close together, summer and early fall always seem to be a long time without many special occasions for kids.) My grandparents who lived a four hour drive away in near Brownwood in west central Texas, owned a ranch and raised cattle and goats. My grandmother had chickens (hens, they called them) and always had a large vegetable garden. My grandfather hunted in the fall and we usually ate wild turkey for thanksgiving (a beautiful bird, but dry and tough, although that may have had more to do with my grandmother’s cooking!) Visiting was always filled with the somewhat hazardous outdoor experiences of snakes and cacti, scorpions and horned toads, armadillos and racoons. Grandmother always served Thanksgiving dinner in the Dining room of their house, which was never used for any other occation, and she always used her best dishes, Fiesta Ware, to which I subsequently fell heir.Each family has it’s own way to celebrate, weather it’s eating turkey hunted in the wild or sititng down to a meal prepared by Luby’s. It’s a special time to gather with family and friends and reflect on those who have struggled to make their lives better, and help us, the subsequent generations make our lives better. It’s a good time to incorporate multicultural ideas into your teaching since it’s Native American Heritage Month and Thanksgiving naturally lends itself to discussion of “Indians.” All world cultures celebrate traditions and rituals of harvest, from the Hebrew Rosh Hoshanna, Iroquois Green Corn Festival or Asian rice harvest celebrations.
Here's our units for fun November activities:
AUTUMN
CORN
THANKSGIVING
AutumnGo for a walk:
Walk on a cool sunny autumn day and collect items from nature to bring indoors for art activities and a discovery area. Bring a bucket and load up with leaves, acorns, pecans, seedheads and pods from grass and weeds, dry grass and bare branches. Look for cattails if you are near water, magnolia cones, evergreen boughs, and whatever inspires you and your students.Collage:
Glue collage items onto a cardboard background with large amounts of white glue. To give a good color contrast between the nature items and the background, paint with light color such as yellow or white, or glue construction or bulletin board paper onto the cardboard and allow to dry before applying collage materials.Leaf Rubbings:
Haven’t we all done this? Just because it is familiar, doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea (even for totally blind students, it’s a good use of texture.) Let students choose a few leaves and place on a bare table or wheelchair tray. Put a piece of paper that’s not heavy (construction paper is too thick) over the leaves and tape down on all sides with masking tape. Color with the side of a peeled crayon or use a crayon cookie (see last month’s issue for directions.)Dried Flowers and Seedheads:
Pick or cut long stalks of grass seedheads, pods and wildflowers (herbs are wonderful to dry, too.) If the plant is a leafy one, remove the lower leaves. Bundle like plants together and wrap rubber bands around the base. Hang upside down and put in a dark room (if possible— it makes better color on the dried flowers.) Allow about two weeks to dry, then attach to a wreath, bundle into a small bouquet, or save and spraypaint gold for Christmas ornaments.Harvest Wreath:
Purchase a straw or grapevine wreath if you want, or make a simple one yourself by coiling a long length of vine into a circle and wrapping the remainder around the circle several times. Help students select nature items gathered from outdoors and stick into the coil of vine. Glue onto wreath with white glue or wait until the kids go home and use a hot glue gun for really good sticking.Spatter Painting:
Arrange a few leaves and other nature items on a red or brown piece of construction paper (or cut open a brown grocery bag and divide it into good size pieces.) Mix yellow tempera paint with an equal amount of water and dip toothbrush or old hairbrush or scrub brush in the paint. Hold bristle side down and scrape a tongue depressor across the bristles to spatter paint on the leaves and background paper. You can make the activity neater by placing the paper on the bottom inside a cardboard box and spattering the paint there. Remove the leaves and enjoy the autumn beauty.Textures:
Cut circles or squares (all the same shape) from corrugated cardboard. Choose autumn materials such as stalks of dried grass, small twigs, pumpkin seeds, dried corn, dried beans, etc. Make two cards of each texture with the material completely covering the card. Let students sort or match the textures. They can also use them for crayon rubbings like the leaf rubbings described previously.Nutty math and science:
Find easily available nuts or seedheads for sorting materials. Look for acorns, pecans, peanuts, magnolia cones, sweetgum balls, sycamore balls, dried wild sunflower seedheads, anything cheap or readily available.For lower functioning children, let them sort two different things from a pile such as acorns and peanuts. Differences in size, weight and texture help make materials easy to discriminate. For more advanced students, let them sort a pile of three or more materials from one another. They can count how many of different types of items it takes to fill a small cup, or weigh a cup of acorns and cup of pecans on a balance scale and decide which is heavier.
CornCorn is native to the new world, and thus unknown in Europe and Africa, where many of our ancestors came from, before the voyage of Columbus. Stories of the first Thanksgiving are filled with corn as one of the foods the Indians taught the Pilgrims to grow, harvest and cook.
For your corn activities, you can find popcorn at grocery stores, and dried corn of the larger variety in the sporting goods section of discount stores (used to lure in game for hunting.) You can also find corn on the cob, especially indian corn, used for decorative purposes is great to have around this time of year for art activities.
Corncob Prints:
Get a few ears of dried corn, Indian corn is inexpensive. If you have full size ears of corn, break them in half so you have more for the kids to use. Give children brown paper and let their make prints from the corn cob by rolling the cob in a shallow tray of paint, then rolling it on their paper. Use yellow or orange for best contrast. Make a flower like design by dipping the broken end of the corncob in paint and stamping it on paper.Corncob Texture Imprints:
Using a seasonal color of playdough, such as red or orange, have children pat it out flat on a piece of construction paper. Then let them make imprints with corncobs used as rollers and stamps as well.Corn Count
For students working on more academic skills, make counting flashcards using popcorn or dried corn glued to a 3 by 5 card. Make number cards by writing the corresponding number on another flashcard using print and braille, if appropriate. Show students how to lay out all the number cards and find the corn card to match. More skilled students can count out loose corn kernels and lay them on the card with the number for you to check. Popcorn is really round and rolly, so minimize corn loss by using a shallow tray as the workspace.Corn Letters
Again, this activity is for your more academic kids. Make a stencil or dark line outline of the letter "C" in either print or braille, according to the medium which is most appropriate for the child. Cutting the letter shape out of a piece of laminated manila file folder or a plastic coffee can lid works well for me. Show students how to spread glue in the stencil on the paper below, and set corn kernels in the glue to make the letter.Popcorn Pilgrim Style:
Pop some popcorn, you may use microwave popcorn in a bag, a popcorn popper, or pop it on the stove top. Give each child a bowl full of popcorn. Pour milk over it like breakfast cereal. Drizzle honey over it. Add fruit. Eat it up! This was the original cold cereal before what we now buy in a box.Corn Sort
For a really fine motor activity, give student a small bowl of dried corn and popcorn mixed together, and have students sort the two types of corn into separate containers. Popcorn is also available in colors, students with color perception can sort the different colors into separate containers.Discovery Bin:
Fill your dishtub with unpopped corn and let kids play in it. They can scoop, pour ladle and drop corn into various containers such as measuring cups, flour scoops, clear plastic cups, bowls, etc. Let them use big and small spoons. It’s a wonderful way for blind students to practice pouring and measuring without making a mess (not that I’m opposed to messes, but you know who gets to do most of the work to clean them up!, also, it takes a lot more time if it’s mess.) You can also buy dried whole corn (like what is on the cob) at places like Walmart in the sporting goods section, because it is use to feed deer. Try having bins with both types of corn for a variety of experiences. For students with severe motor impairments, keep object in the bin to a minimum, to aide exploration. If the kids get bored or are reluctant to touch, put in my favorite vibrator, a Squiggle Wiggle Writer with the pen tip removed. Most kids with tactual defensiveness enjoy exploring things that vibrate.
Thanksgiving Food: Recipes for FunCranberry Jello Jigglers
For eating or for playing, make jello jigglers in the new cranberry flavor.
You will need:
2 large or 4 small packages of cranberry jello
2 1/2 cups boiling water or apple juice or cranberry juice cocktail
Pour the boiling liquid into a bowl into which the jello mix has already been added. Stir until it’s dissolved. Refrigerate 3 hours. Pour the mixture into a cakepan or casserole dish, preferably glass. When firm, remove from pan by placing bottom of pan for about 15 seconds in hot water in a sink or larger pan. This stuff is hard to get out of the pan, so do it when kids are not around, if
possible. When removed, slide onto a cookie sheet or tray and cut into individual pieces. Let students cut it with cookie cutters, or cut into blocks and play with it.Sweet Potato Pudding
2 cups cooked sweet potato chunks
1/3 cup orange juice
2 eggs
1 teasp cinnamon
1/4 teasp nutmeg
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cook sweet potato by first cleaning and cutting into chunks about the size of a quarter. Place in microwave safe bowl. Cover and cook about five minutes. Check for done-ness. Cook more if necessary. If a microwave is not available, cook on stovetop in a pan with water to almost cover. Cover pan while cooking. Simmer until soft. When sweet potato is soft, mash with a potato masher or pastry cutter. Add other ingredients. Pour into greased baking dish. Bake for 40 minutes. Serve warm or cold. Top with whipped cream or honey.Cornbread
I would urge you to try a mix first, then if you are looking for more cooking activities, also make some from scratch. You can make cornbread muffins (with or without cupcake cups), also you can pour batter into a round or square cake pan and cut into squares after baking. Cornbread baked in a cake pan is less crusty and easier to chew. If you like to let the students experience all the ingredients, try making this recipe.Buttermilk Corn Bread
1 1/2 c cornmeal
1/2 c whole wheat flour
2 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1 t salt
2 eggs
3 T brown sugar or honey
1 3/4 cups buttermilk
2 T butter or corn oil
Preheat oven to 425.
Mix together dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix together wet ingredients. Oil baking pan. Mix wet and dry ingredients together. Stir and don’t worry about lumps, once it’s wet, get it in the oven quickly. Bake 20 to 25 minutes. Allow to cool and cut into squares.
BACK TO TOPHave fun and happy Thanksgiving ! Holly