I was hanging in one of our preschool classes with my new fave preschool teacher, Annie, to co-teach with her. She had a fun lesson for dipping apples into different toppings. We did a quick brainstorm and turned her lesson into a Braille lesson with a few quick changes. Next thing we know, we have this fun ECC lesson and are making Braille sundaes.
Annie's lesson started like this:
And became an Expanded Core Curriculum lesson:
We added an APH tray (any tray will do though) and arrange the toppings into a Braille cell.
Easy update!
For instruction, we reviewed the Braille cell and the corresponding numbers.
For example, (look at the picture above), the chocolate chips are "dot one", the caramel sauce is "dot 2", etc.
Students took turns selecting toppings but had to request it by the number (to teach the number configuration of a Braille cell). It was a success! The students did great requesting using the dot numbers. For example, "dot 6, sprinkles".We did a quick but direct instruction on the Braille cell to set the students up for success in the lesson.
This wasn't just a Braille lesson though. We incorporated much of the Expanded Core, too!
We addressed other areas of the ECC such as:
Independent Living Skills: cooking skills at the preschool level
Orientation & mobility: positional concepts
Self-determination: making choices, trying new things and making opinions about them
Social skills: turn taking, eating etiquette and conversation.
These were the areas that also received special instruction during this Braille lesson. We had each of these areas in mind during instruction (that's the secret to implementing ECC!). This was a preschool lesson so the whole lesson was about 30-35 minutes. My favorite part: listening to these sweet little preschoolers request their toppings using it as a Braille cell ("dot 2, caramel sauce!").
