As TVIs, therapists, special educators or family members, we never have enough time to create all of the books that we want to. Happily APH came out with a cool new product called Tactile Book Builder Kit and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT! This kit makes life so much easier! There are ready-made book binders, card stock pages, and so much more in the kit. The time spent binding has now been reduced. In some cases I may still choose to do a special binding, but at least now it’s a choice.
I ordered several of these kits and met with 4 speech therapists and their supervisor, as well as the other TVI I work with. I reviewed the items in the kit, the amazing guide book that comes with it, and some handouts from previous sessions I’ve done, as well as a planning sheet I created to help plan out the book. Then I felt like Oprah and said, “You get a kit! And you get a kit!” All laughing aside, everyone was thrilled to get a kit and couldn’t wait to get started.
Starting with Planning Sheets
With any creation of materials, it’s important to begin by identifying the objectives and looking at which activities will support addressing those objectives. We used these planning sheets to help us get started. This example of “Starting the Day” is for a bilngual student, so we included both the English and the Spanish text that will be used in the book.
Setting Up an After Hours Book-Making Party
Trying to figure out how to make time to create these books can be the tricky part. We all agreed to meet at my house, as my garage is filled with tubs and tubs and tubs of materials, each in its own Ziploc bag. The first “party” was at my home.
We’ve now had two with plans for more in the fall. One of the speech therapists that I co-treat one day a week with, took my original planning sheet and adapted it so it was more user friendly. I was THRILLED to see how she changed my sheet and loved that she did it! There were lots of great conversations that evening with ideas being bounced off each other. Some ideas triggered other ideas. The excitement was building by the minute.
No one finished their books the first night. Lots of materials were taken from my tubs as they went home to work on what we started. The second night, not as many showed, but more books were worked on and ideas floated about.
Shape Book Made by Speech Therapist
The speech therapist made this shape book for a student we co-treat and shared it with me before introducing it to the student. She made each page progressively more complex and we created braille word cards saying “same” and “different” for him to use to use with each page. The book focuses on circles and triangles, and with examples of some of his preferred food items of those shapes.
After trying it with our student, we observed some minor changes that need to occur and she will tweak the book a bit. This happens when making most books though: the students become our editors and basically tell us through their actions what works and what doesn’t.
