4 Engaging St. Patrick’s Day Activities for Students with CVI

Get your green clothes ready, St. Patrick’s Day is almost here! In this blog post, I share four engaging St. Patrick’s Day activities for students with cortical visual impairment. Since these activities are interactive, high contrast, and involve minimal distractions, these St. Patrick’s Day activities can be beneficial for a variety of students.

Adapted Books

Adapted books can be a great way to introduce new vocabulary or to practice known vocabulary words. They have a built-in interactive component that can make lessons more engaging to students. I create leveled adapted books so whether you are looking for a wordless book, need books with a simple “I see” sentence, or need books with interactive pieces, my book sets have what you need. You can find my CVI Series: All About St. Patrick’s Day Adapted Books here.

St. Patrick’s Day Activities: Sensory Bins

There are so many ways to set up a sensory bin. Here I share two St. Patrick’s Day-themed bins, but please know there are so many more.

One of my favorite types of bins is an “explorer” sensory bin. In these bins, I place multiple themed items in the container and allow students to explore them. For St. Patrick’s Day I like to include:

• Beads
• Glitter shamrocks
• Pots of gold
• Gold coins
• Green Tinsel Garland

If including all of these items in one bin is too visually stimulating, you can have your students explore one or two at a time. I found all of these items for very low prices at Party City and Amazon (affiliate links). I included the links to some of the items above.

The second type of sensory bin I like using involves a single filler and vocabulary/activity cards. The point of this sensory bin is to get exposure to the vocabulary or to complete an activity by finding the corresponding vocab cards in the sensory bin. This is an easy way to make vocabulary activities more engaging!

Light Table Activities

For St. Patrick’s Day, I love having students explore shamrocks. For easy shamrocks, I use green page dividers or folders to cut out different sizes of shamrocks. Some students can focus on locating the shamrock on the light table. Students could also work on size (big and little) with shamrocks on the light table.

Update: Using green cellophane is another option when creating shamrocks for the light table. 

St. Patrick’s Day Activities: Craft

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

1. Print out a shamrock template from Google
2. Cut out the template and glue it on black paper.
3. Find different green textures (foam paper, felt, pom poms, metallic paper, feathers, etc) and have students decorate the shamrock.

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

5 Winter Craft Ideas for Students with CVI

Teaching Counting to Students with CVI

“Go” Core Vocabulary Activities for Students with Cortical Visual Impairment

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