Supporting Friendships Through Creating Accessible Books

My son Liam has a good friend from school named Bella. They are in the same first grade class, where Liam is fully included. (Liam is deafblind and Bella has typical vision and hearing.)  We love it when she gets to come over to our house to play!  We always try to do a "craft" when she comes over.  This visit we decided to MAKE books.  

Goal:  

Materials to prepare ahead of time:

• Blank chipboard books (I found mine on Amazon.)
• Small cardboard pieces with braille (AND with print) words placed on them. (I got this idea of the velcro squares from Liam's TVI at school!) Carefully choose words that the kids will know and also that will be able to make a variety of sentences.
• Place velcro pieces on the back of the word pieces.    
• Place Velcro strip on the bottom of every page of the book
• Large cardboard piece covered with velcro (to place word pieces on it and keep them in one place) 

Procedure:  Here's what we did!  

1.  Examine word cards.

​Liam and Bella explored all of the word options using the large cardboard piece.  

2.  Make sentences with word cards.

They both came up with sentences using the words and placed them onto the pages of their books.  

3.  Illustrate pages with tactile stickers.

Next, we had a variety of tactile stickers.  The kids used the stickers to "illustrate"  their books.

4.  Add title to book.

They added a "TITLE" to their book by themselves!  (Of course, in print and braille!)  

5.  Read book together!

Lastly, Liam got to read his book to Bella and Bella read her book to Liam! 

Note on the pictures:  When it was Bella's turn to read her book that she made to Liam, Liam would first read braille in her book and THEN Bella would read the sentence to him using "Tactile American Sign Language".   Liam read his book to Bella using American Sign Language (ASL).