Kid Craft: Tactile Cardboard Houses

 Architecture starts simple when you're dealing with kids who are working at pre-school level of cognitive abilities. And because my students are blind, and may have never seen a house in it's entirity, I started my architecture unit with the parts of a house. Walls, roof, doors, and windows. I'd ask each student if they wanted a tall or short house, a triange or rectangle roof, a single or a double door. How many windows? How many panes in each window? Would you like shutters or a window box? What about a chimney for Santa? They make choices and glue each piece that I cut out cardboard according to their commands. What we end up with is a tactile version of an elevation of a house. Most kids know how to draw a recognizable house by kindergarten, but without vision, this is the next best thing. These houses are  building blocks for our unit to continue, but they'd also make a fun craft for any preschooler.

Bubble Painting

 Bubble painting is fun to do for little kids who are get excited about blowing bubbles through straws (like I did in kindergarten). To do this, you mix 3 tablespoons of water, 1 tablespoon of dish soap, and a few squirts of food coloring in a cup.  Use a straw to blow bubbles until they are coming out the top. Then pull the straw out and gently place a piece of paper on top of the cup until the bubbles pop.  If you want more organic forms, wait until you make enough bubbles to start coming down the side, and then move the paper without pressing it to the cup top. You can create some wonderful textures and overlapping colors with this process centered art project. Experiment and enjoy!

Cardboard ornaments

Toddlers, pre-schoolers and multiple-complex-needs students need to make things in order to build fine motor skills and feel a sense of accomplishment. One way to keep kids and happy, busy, and learning, this month is to make ornaments. A cardboard triangle and rectangle make the tree-shaped base for this easy ornament. My students puddled and "scribbled" glue onto their shape before arranging little things onto the glue: expired pasta, fish tank pebbles, buttons, foam shapes, beads, etc. Be sure to watch that little ones don't put small items in their mouth and choke on them. 

We didn't even wait for the glue to dry completely before taking them outside and spray painting them. I hot glued ribbon for them to hang on the tree. The gold paint gives the tree a little bling, and you can pretend that the ones with askew trunks are supposed to be bells!