Holiday Banner

Merry Everything to Everyone--Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa or Happy Holidays! Whatever you celebrate, let's have some holiday fun. I am a Christmas girl myself and so are the students that participated in our after school program.
We made these awesome Christmas banners for home decorations. It's an easy peasy project (especially for all the "not-so-crafty" people). I used the APH Carousel of Textures papers as well as few glittery papers I snagged for super cheap at Walmart and some construction paper.

I Googled a Christmas light clipart and used that as my template. I cutout a ton of lights using my template and all my different textured papers. The textured papers included glitter/sparkles (textures and visually appealing), velvet, bumpy, corrugated cardboard and rough. 

I printed out "Merry Christmas" on card stock. I made sure to use a font and size that were easy for my visual students to read. My Braille students made a Braille label  and put it over the print. 

Then, we used our favorite art friend, the stapler and whipped up these cute banners!

We chose red card stock as our banner base but you can let your Christmas creativity take you to new places and use other textures/fabric/paper. I went with red card stock for the durability, the easiness of it and the contrast with the lights. 

Did you read my last post on why the stapler is your art project's best friend? If not, go back to last week and read about it in the post "Textured Turkeys".

I've blogged a lot of about holiday projects over the years. Go back through my archives and check them out!

Remember, this is also STOCK UP time for your CVI supplies!! All those colored lights, red shiny ornaments and paper---stock up baby!

Wiggly Eye Sticker Chart

I was walking past this bulletin board in our of schools today when I stumbled upon this fun reward chart. This is an orientation & mobility reward chart by Linda Bredeen (a fab instructor). Let me tell you why I snapped a quick pic to blog about. Have you ever tried to use sticker charts for elementary school age kids with a vision impairment? It's doable but not awesome because there isn't a ton of fun for our kids with traditional stickers. Other alternatives are usually scratch & sniff stickers but even that doesn't always give instant feedback.  But check out Linda's idea with the wiggly eyes idea! 

I ran into her later that day and chatted with her about it. She told me that the kids LOVE using the wiggly eyes and they get a kick out of putting them on their chart. Lots of good feedback for the kids.  It's an easy peasy way to make a vision modification to an everyday school item. Have fun!