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Outside the Box Craft Blogs

If you are like most teachers, especially if you are a "craft impaired" teacher, you are always looking for craft ideas that are new and different beyond the usual hand print turkey at Thanksgiving and vegetable print painting in the spring.  Add these blogs to your RSS reader or just bookmark them to visit periodically for new ideas to try out. 

• The Crafty Crow - with entries like "What can you do with paper tubes?" and many crafts related to children's literature this is a great blog to have on the ready
• Dollar Store Crafts - the name pretty much says it all 
• Kid's Craft Weekly - is a free weekly newsletter you can have sent to your email in box or you can go through the archives
• Kiddio - another mixed content blog with a link to kids crafts entries, these projects are very cute
• Made by Joel - mostly crafts to make for kids, but many can be made with kids and/or using various assistive technology adaptivations
• Make and Take Kids Crafts - these craft and activity ideas tend to flow with the seasons and their holidays
• Mel's Own Place - the most recent post is drawing with fabric paint on plastic bottle caps to make stamps, my suggestion is to hot glue some spools inside to adapt them and your off, check out this site
• Mineco - Eco-crafts and recycled crafts to do with children (great site for the eco heavy Unique units if you are a Unique Learning teacher)
• One Crafty Place - does not appear to be recently updated but has some great activity ideas
• Plaid Kid Crafts - all sorts of craft ideas to try with kids
• Roots and Wings - another multi-topic "mommy blog" however the craft ideas in this one usually lead to an activity you can do with the project (water bottle ring toss, science experiments with an altoids tin before crafting with it)
• Silly Eagle Books - this is a "mommy blog" (said with the utmost of respect some of my favorite blogs are "mommy blogs") about favorite children's books which often has activities and crafts to go with the books written about 
• Skip to My Lou's - all sorts of simple craft ideas in a multi-topic blog
• Zakka Life - is a blog about crafts and recipes but this link goes to their kids craft ideas and instructions

When doing crafts in your classroom you are going to want to consider all the ways you can possibly integrate assistive technology (your pouring cup for glitter, your environmental control box with a switch and a hair dryer to dry crafts or your battery operated scissors with a switch for cutting) in addition to embedding as many communication opportunities as possible (see this post).

Also it helps to remind each other that parents, in general, do NOT WANT what Robert Rummel-Hudson calls Macaroni Art (see the sixth paragraph of this blog entry).  Parents can tell what their child has actually worked on and participated in versus what they sat next to an adult for while the adult did the work.  A friend of mine was telling me recently how her son, who "participates" in art class by directing his 1:1 aide on her drawings had taken to writing notes to the 1:1 complementing the improvement in her drawing skills.  That mother wonders why her child even takes art.  (Especially since the children aren't allowed to talk with each other while they work so it isn't for socialization.)

While we do our arts and crafts projects we have to be clear about our goals and objectives for the lesson and how doing the project helps students meet their IEP goals and objectives.  In fact it might help to write about the child's process in completing the project on the back or on an index card attached to the project so everyone is clear.  How can we answer the questions, "How is this child participating as fully as possible in ALL aspects of this project?" and "What is the purpose of this child participating in this project?"

Communication During Crafts

This past week our class decorated some wooden card holders we had recently acquired.  We gathered up all our craft materials, with help from the students, especially those with "will gather needed items..." benchmarks on their IEPs and set to work.  As you all know crafting in our classrooms is unlike crafting anywhere else.  While it is a motor skills activity for some of our students, be it directly completing steps in finishing the craft independently, participating with visual/verbal cues or using hand-over-hand or hand-under-hand assistance or using a switch adapted tool like battery operated scissors or a fan and an a Powerlink to dry paint; crafting is often times much more a communication activity.  That too occurs at many different levels, from pointing with a finger or using eye gaze to make choices from objects in a field of two or pressing a sequential step to play a message about the craft to use of middle level AAC like a communication book or static display device to use of a high technology device with dynamic display. 


Here are some of the ways we communicate during crafts:

• facial expressions and gestures/signs to confirm/deny, comment and make choices
• voice output switches to comment and request
• pointing to objects or symbols to make choices
• eye gaze to objects or symbols to make choices
• static display devices to make choices, comment, request, deny and more through direct various access methods
• dynamic display (including Minspeak/Unity at times) do all of the above

Here are some of the things we make choices about in the course of doing crafts:

• colors
• embellishments (glitter, googly eyes, craft foam, felt, fabric paint, etc)
• shapes
• size
• placement on the page/craft
• when we are done with each step and the final product

Finally our class is just starting to work out how to best have each student tell about his or her product and the process of making it, some ways to do this are sequential switch, creating a document using Clicker5, Classroom Suite or Boardmaker Plus, using communication symbols/boards with core vocabulary and fringe vocabulary, using mid to high tech AAC with core vocabulary and related fringe vocabulary or something else.  How do other people do this so as to have every student share his or her product at the highest level of self-generated language possible for each individual?

This student picked brown,3 googly eyes, a red felt star and to write, "play cards" in orange and yellow using craft foam letters.  Choices were made using a combination of a high technology AAC device with direct selection and pointing to objects. 
This crafter choose a silver background by picking the paint bottle out of the basket and then choose the googly eyes by picking them up as well.  This student always has the most googly eyes possible on every project!












This student made the card holder white with shiny colored flowers; choices were made using eye gaze to objects and a sequential switch.



As you can see, no matter how communication happened the card holders turned out fantastic!

Handmade Special Needs Products

Etsy is a website that sells handmade and vintage items made by individuals. It is also be a great source for items for individuals with special needs. By searching for terms such as, "sensory", "developmental" or "tactile" you can find all sort of unique products. (Try also autism, teacher, special needs, educational, and more.) If you need something even more special many of the crafters and artists take requests.
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