Our Favorite Spring Crafts

Our Favorite Spring Craft Ideas

Maracas

Celebrate Easter, Cinco de Mayo, or any festive holiday with these fun, easy-to-make maracas. Babies and young children with visual impairments respond to the sound they make and their bright colors. All you need are some plastic Easter eggs, rice or beans to fill them, plastic spoons, and colored tape. Learn more HERE.

Tactile Easter Eggs

Adding textures or other elements to Easter eggs isn’t just a great way to make them more accessible for your child, but they also add interest and creativity to any Easter basket. Some of our favorite tactile egg-decorating ideas are sparkly jewel stickers, pom poms, buttons, beads, sequins, and felt stickers. Try this craft activity HERE.

Peeps Play Dough

Peeps are popping up at grocery stores this spring. You can eat those marshmallow chicks, but it’s more fun to turn them into Peeps play dough by microwaving the candies with coconut oil. Mix the dough, pat it, cut out shapes, or roll the dough into a long coil and make a basket for your eggs. HERE is the recipe.

Get "Hoppy" and Read

What are we reading this spring? Alan Baker’s Little Rabbit’s Bedtime, of course. It’s a great example of a simple story that describes events from a child’s own experience, such as getting ready for bedtime.

To make the story more engaging to your child, turn it into a story box with real items that correspond to the objects in the story -- a sponge, a rubber duck, a fluffy towel, a toothbrush etc. As you read the story out loud with your child, let them interact with the objects in the story. Talk about how soft the towel is or the funny sound the duck makes when you squeeze it. Remember that your EI-TVI can help adapt the story with braille! Make a story box HERE.

What We Love Now

How do you make an Easter egg hunt in your yard or around your home more accessible for your child who is blind or has low vision? With beeping Easter eggs!

These pastel-colored, plastic eggs have a beeper inside them that makes a chirping sound so your child can use their hearing to find them; holes in the eggs make it easier to hear them chirp. You can add textured stickers to the eggs so your child can identify them by touch, too. Find the eggs HERE.

What Is the Difference Between an EI-TVI and a Vision Therapist?

If your child is blind or has low vision, you might be receiving early intervention services from an Early Intervention Teacher of the Visually Impaired, or EI-TVI. It’s easy to confuse her job with some of the other therapies your child might be receiving. Most importantly, she is not a vision therapist. Here’s the difference.

EI-TVIs are licensed special educators with advanced degrees focused on children from birth to age three with blindness, deaf-blindness, or low vision. They work in families’ homes and provide education and strategies to help caregivers raise a child with blindness or low vision to their fullest potential. This support is free to families who have been referred to their local EI Broker for early intervention services. A Shared Vision is home for 12 EI-TVIs who support families throughout Colorado.

Vision therapy involves eye exercises usually prescribed by your optometrist. They are intended to correct sensorimotor and/or visual-perceptual problems – like physical therapy for your eyes. The goal is to train the brain to process visual information more efficiently by improving the ability to use both eyes together, treating eye deviations, and slowing the progression of nearsightedness. These services are not free, but they may be covered by Medicaid or private insurance.

Support A Shared Vision While You Shop for Groceries

Thanks to the families who shop at King Soopers and City Market in Colorado, A Shared Vision received $1,395 in 2024! We are grateful for all who have signed up for the King Soopers/City Market Community Awards program, which donates a percentage of your grocery purchases to A Shared Vision at no cost to you. Learn how to sign up for this program HERE and support Colorado’s children who are blind or have low vision.

Sign Up for 2025 Vision Screening Training

We are excited to announce the 2025 release of our highly successful Vision Screening Protocol© for early intervention professionals.

This update incorporates feedback from Colorado’s top pediatric ophthalmologists and optometrists, enhancing the precision and effectiveness of the tool with more specific recommendations for caregivers. Additionally, we have integrated a HIPAA-compliant cloud-based platform to greatly streamline the administration of the protocol. Caregivers can take the Vision Screening Questionnaire© on ANY device, and there are no PDFs to download or print. Sign up for training HERE.

A Shared Vision is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and the leading provider of in-home and community early intervention vision services in Colorado. We inspire and empower families to nurture the development of their very young children who are blind or visually impaired so that all children may discover their brightest future.

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