Decorating Tactile Easter Eggs with Your Blind Child
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Ivan loves to work on a “project” or “activity.” These are words that make him happy! But putting together a craft project or activity that is accessible and fun for him can be a challenge. Over the years I’ve learned that it’s important to think about the process more than the finished product and to be prepared from the beginning.
So that’s how we approached our Easter Egg decorating project. I wanted to try egg dying (more for the experience than the colors since Ivan is totally blind), but also wanted to add a nice tactile element that Ivan could appreciate.
What You’ll Need
- Dyeable Decorating Easter Eggs
- Paper cups
- Food coloring
- Tactile foam stickers
- Jewel stickers
What We Did
We started out by picking up some fake eggs. Yep, you read that right. Real hard boiled eggs pose more challenges than I thought would be necessary (mostly cracking from being held too tightly or being dropped on the floor). This can also be a great alternative for kids with egg allergies. These eggs look and feel a lot like real eggs, but they’re less fragile and easier to handle.
We then filled 12 paper cups with hot water, vinegar and food coloring. You can follow the decorations on the food coloring package for ratio of water to dye, but keep in mind that fake eggs do dye lighter than real eggs, so you may want to use a bit more dye than is called for (we used the recommended amount and our eggs are light, but still pretty and festive).
But there is one issue with these fake eggs. They don’t sink. As in, when you try to dye them, they float. Ivan really enjoyed placing each egg in its cup (a great fine-motor activity, by the way), but in order to get the eggs submerged we then stacked the cups on top of each other. I really don’t know how we didn’t end up with food coloring everywhere… but it worked!
Once our eggs were dyed and dried, the real fun began. I purchased tactile foam stickers and jewel stickers to decorate our eggs with. The stickers are pretty, seasonal and super easy to apply (making the activity accessible for kids with low tone)… plus you can FEEL the stickers on the eggs!
Touching the decorated eggs was Ivan’s favorite part. And since our eggs aren’t perishable, we can keep them out on the table and play with them every day until Easter… and then bring them out again next Easter when we make more!
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