Video
Supermarket Tactile Book
In this video, Ira Padhye presents an experience book that she made for her students about going to the supermarket.
This Teachable Moments on Supermarket Tactile Book features Ira Padhye, teacher in the deafblind program at Perkins. Ira presents an experience book that she made for her students about going to the supermarket. Using tactile elements, Ira has created a book that is accessible to students who are blind or visually impaired and early tactile learners. In this video Ira shares strategies for making the book as well as strategies for teaching shopping concepts.
Transcript: Supermarket Tactile Book
Hi, my name is Ira Padhye, I’m a teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind in the Deafblind program and I’m here to talk to you today about adapted books.
I wanted to talk to you about this experience story I’ve made for my students who are between the age ranges of 11 to 13 years old, who are totally blind with hearing impairments and cognitive delays.
Now I really enjoy making experience stories based on experiences that the students have had in the past because it’s very difficult to find age appropriate materials that also have simple language that my students will understand.
So this in particular is about the supermarket.
This might not look like the supermarket to you, but this is a little piece of my loop board that we use to create our shopping list, so this, to the students, means their shopping list, and these are the symbols that represent our field trip.
So every Wednesday we go to the supermarket with our shopping list; the shopping list and field trip, to them, means supermarket.
I have laminated paper, but oftentimes people are concerned about glare, but since my students are totally blind, glare is not a factor. And I use materials that are the actual objects that are also meaningful to my students.
I either use the actual object or scale down the actual object to a smaller size in order for them to fit on the paper.
So this is our story about the supermarket and it’s broken down into 5 steps.
So, just like students with vision impairments, for who we want to create a simple visual representation. My students are early tactile learners, so I wanted to create a simple tactile representation for them too.
That means one object, or partial object, and just one word brailled.
In this instance, milk is the only thing that’s brailled. So this page means milk and then this way the students can also open the milk and kind of take part in it.
How I usually present this activity to my students is I get a shopping basket, I get the actual objects, so I have a whole container of milk.
So we’ll go through each page.
So in this instance, we’ll take the milk carton, we’ll taste a little bit of the milk, we’ll feel this page, and then we’ll put the milk carton into the shopping basket.
Same thing with cereal.
We’ll open the cereal box, we’ll taste a little bit of the cereal, and then we’ll put it into the cereal box.
So have the students go through the motions of the actual experience that they had.
I’ve used dried orange peel and then, I give them money, and then, we take the bag.
And that’s today’s teachable moment.
Presented by Ira Padhye
Length of time to complete: approximately 5 minutes
