Students with visual impairments may often have difficulty expressing their feelings or be overly sensitive. What may be perceived as acting out behaviors, may simply be a non-understanding of the situation. While working in Building on Patterns Curriculum Kindergarten level, this became evident. Lesson 8 has a poem about crying in it. 8 short lines, but my student was in tears by the end of the 3rd line. Lesson 15 had a short story “Finding a New Way” where the children get lost. Again, before I could finish the story, my student was in tears.
As a result, I created the feelings book. Since my student is a print reader learning braille, I decided to let her do the book in print since it was an uncomfortable topic we were discussing.
Materials
- Feelings booklet in print or braille Click here to download.
- writing materials for print or braille
Procedure
- On each page invite the student to list his or her things that go with each of the feelings.
- Talk about the feelings and what the student writes.
- Add pages to the book as the feeling comes up. Recently my student was worried about something so we added the worry page.
- I’ve scanned her responses and shared them with her educational team which includes the parent. I put little dots by each of the items in the list so that we as a team can talk about bullet 2 on the sad page or bullet 1 and 3 on the worry page.
You can go online and do a search for generic feelings like I did on Amazon or do a search for a specific feeling. I recently ordered the book What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Anxiety (What to Do Guides for Kids).
