Memorization Fun: A Sentence-Building Activity
My son Liam is a second grader who loves braille. He happens to be deafblind. At church there are Bible verses that he needs to memorize. The following activity is a motivating way for him to memorize his verses. This activity can be modified to fit any passage you want your child to memorize or it could just be a fun sentence-building activity at school or home!
This idea was inspired by an activity that Liam's TVI and team have done on many occasions with Liam at his school. His team would add braille to small rectangle cardboard pieces and attach Velcro to the backs of the words. Liam then could use the velcro pieces to sort words by patterns like his peers (he attends a mainstream second grade classroom) or he could create sentences with his pieces. Liam loves these cardboard pieces. Using this same idea for church, I added braille words (from his verses) to rectangle pieces so that Liam could use them to "build" his Bible verse.
- Velcro catch board (from a game set)
- Notecard boxes or pencil boxes
- Velcro circles or pieces
- Gorilla glue (super glue) to glue the Velcro to the cardboard pieces. The "sticky" part of the Velcro circles is not strong enough to hold. It will rip off if not glued down.
- Small cardboard pieces
- Braille labels for the pieces and also the outside of the box
- Small tray, box or bowl (to lay the pieces out )
- Read the verse together (sentence or sort pattern) on the outside of the box that your child will be "building".
- Then pour the pieces onto the tray and allow your child to organize them in any way they would like. Discuss new or unfamiliar words.
- Then start building! I give my son prompts such as, "Find the word ______. " I help him with every word at first until eventually he can do the entire verse by himself without any prompts.
- Add the words in order onto the Velcro catch pad.
In the video below, Liam demonstrates this activity reading a braille verse from the Bible and signing it in ASL. The verse is from Proverbs: "Trust the Lord with all your heart."
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Liam