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Pre-braille
Apple Trees
Find the apples and plant an orchard.
Make the River Flow
Create an unbroken line… and make the water flow!
Pre-braille Activity
Level: 2
Number of players: 1 and +
Duration: 10 min
Skills:
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Orient objects
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Develop tactile tracking skills
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Engage in pretend-play sequences
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Accept new tactile experiences
Boats need a good riverbed and water to navigate. Build unbroken straight river banks and play with boats or swimming animals.
Goals
To explore the tactile properties of a brick, and work on orientation and alignment.
To reduce any tactile defensiveness around water and help the children tell a story about the boat or other water toys.
This activity works on spatial skills which allow the children to imagine objects and manipulate bricks.
The adult prepares
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1 baseplate
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16 letter-bricks H, G and J in a bowl
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1 bowl of water
Place a brick in reading position, at the bottom left corner of the baseplate.
The children play
1
The child explores the baseplate to find the source of the braille brick river.
Tell them to add more bricks to continue the riverbed, with the flat area at the bottom of the bricks representing the water.
2
When the riverbed is built, tell the child to follow the flow of the water with their finger from the source to make sure the river is smooth and calm.
Then, they can wet the riverbed with the real water and sail a boat.
Angelo and Rochel, we’re going to play “the river”.
You can take a brick from the bowl, one brick.
Can you see where the little dots are?
Where are the little dots? Did you find the dots?
We’ll put them at the top, and we’re going to attach the brick at the bottom of the plate.
Can you take the other bricks and keep the river flowing all the way down?
Go and get more bricks. Get another brick and keep the river flowing. Yes.
Are you done?
-Yes.
So do we have a big river that flows all the way to the end? Does it flow all the way to the end?
Should we try with water?
We’re going to take pirogues across the water. There, in the bowl, there is water.
You come and get some water on your fingers and you put water on the river to make it flow.
I’ll give you a pirogue, and the pirogue, it can go all the way to the the end of the river.
We make it stream forward, we navigate it to the end.
Facilitation tips
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Encourage and demonstrate tactile exploration of the brick. Identify the flat space as the bottom of the brick and explain braille brick orientation: space at the bottom, studs at the top!
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To make the activity easier, place more starting bricks. Change the letters to vary the difficulty.
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Say: Imagine where the river is flowing to?
The child might respond ‘it’s flowing from my hometown to the ocean’ for example. -
What could the studs be above the water?
The child might respond ‘they’re children playing in little boats’ or ‘they’re ducks’ or ‘crocodiles’!