4 Engaging CVI-friendly Spring Activities

Spring is here! In this blog post, I share four CVI-friendly spring activities. Since these activities are interactive, high contrast, and involve minimal distractions, these spring-themed activities can be beneficial for a variety of students.

Adapted Books

Adapted books can be beneficial for students because they allow teachers to focus on specific targeted skills. For example, some books target one-step directions. Other adapted books can target a specific set of vocabulary. I create a multitude of adapted books that can help you target a variety of skills. In “The Flowers in My Garden” Adapted Book, one of the targeted skills is visual scanning.  This CVI-friendly spring activity requires students to scan each page and locate the flower. You can find my CVI Series: The Flowers in My Garden Adapted Books here.

Sensory Bins

As I have discussed in previous blog posts, there are a variety of sensory bins that can be created. I am going to share two spring-themed sensory bins that are visually stimulating to give you ideas for the spring season.

For my “explorer” sensory bin this season, I focused on the theme of planting a flower. As a reminder, “explorer” sensory bins are ones that have multiple items in the container for students to explore. For this type of sensory bin, I like to include:

• Fake Flowers
• Plastic Flower Pots
• Mini shovel
• Mini rake
• Watering can
• Dry Black Beans (optional filler)

Additionally, if including all of these items is too visually stimulating, you can have your students explore one or two at a time.

The second type of sensory bin I like using involves a single filler and vocabulary cards. The point of this sensory bin can be to expose students to a specific set of vocabulary words. This is an easy way to make vocabulary activities more engaging! In the image below, I used white and silver shredded paper. This filler provides a nice contrast to the vocabulary cards with a black background.

You can grab my FREE spring-themed, CVI-friendly vocabulary cards here.

Light Table Activities

Continuing with the flower theme, this CVI-friendly spring activity includes decorating flowers on a light table! To do this, I like to use flower-shaped cookie cutters and Translucent Gems from Lakeshore (non-affiliate link included). Students can use their fingers or fine motor tools to pick up the gems and put them into the flower cookie cutters. If students are working on sorting by color, each flower can be decorated with a single color. If not, students can mix and match the colors to fill the cookie cutters.

Craft

For a simple, CVI-friendly craft, it is fun to decorate a flower using different bright-colored textures. To create this craft:

1. Print out a flower template from Google
2. Cut out the template and glue on black paper.
3. Allow students to pick what color they want to make their flower. Then, some or all of the following textured materials can be used: foam paper, felt, pom poms, metallic paper, etc.

Bonus: To make the center of the flower, cut a yellow circle from construction paper and put it in the center of the flower. This will act as a visual reminder for students. Additionally, students can then use yellow-colored textures to decorate the center of the flower.

Interested in other CVI-related blog posts? Check these out!

3 CVI Literacy Adaptations

Go Core Vocabulary Activities for Students with Cortical Visual Impairment

Teaching Counting to Students with CVI