Decorate cookies to celebrate World Braille Day, holidays or for a fun ECC activity. There are multiple objectives involved with Braille Code Cookie activity.
The fun part is to decorate and eat the cookies, as well as share the cookies with friends for them to decode the braille.
Melt one block of the almond bark in the microwave (checking and stirring often). Use a microwave safe dish and spatulas. The melted candy will be hot, so please use caution and supervision. Add the melted candy to the cookie and allow the student to use a spatula to spread the candy. The candy coating hardens with the edible pearls, allowing students to read the Braille tactilely. Alternatively, you can use frosting from a can.
Press the white pearls, chips or sprinkles into the melted almond bark to spell a fun word to decode. Some fun words to spell are love, joy, peace, kind, etc. Shorter words are better because the cookies are generally too small for large words.
Enjoy eating the cookies but don’t forget to share. Share the cookies in a zip lock bag with the Braille Decoder included for your friends.
Here is the Braille decorder document which contains the dot configuration for each letter of the Braille Code.
The image shows 5 cookies decorated with white almond bark (candy coating) and white edible pearls that are used as braille dots. The dots on the cookies spell either the word “love,” or “joy.” The almond bark and white pearl ingredients are also included in the picture.
https://www.perkins.org/sites/elearning.perkinsdev1.org/files/Braille%20Cookie%20decoding%20activity.docx
By Jeanette Norman