Media Minute – Residential Hobby Hour

For the past four years on Wednesday evenings on the TSBVI campus as many as twenty students from several dorms gather for “Hobby Hour.” Residential Instructors, led by Danielle Caren, prepare and introduce craft activities to each student, making adaptations so all can engage in the fun. When asked about favorite activities, Angel, Blair, and Teagan all mentioned pumpkins! Tay shared another favorite was making birdhouses, that they were “amazing,” and “I like going to Hobby Hour!”

This Media Minute will feature documentation of the creative abundance of this weekly residential event. From edible paint to cracking down a block of ice, at Hobby Hour students have the opportunity to explore their sensory channels and build artistic, social, and recreation and leisure skills. Take notes for stimulating and motivating activities to try at home!

Have you heard of the Austin “Trail of Lights,” a holiday tradition with holiday displays, decorations, and lighted tunnels? Save the date for TSBVI’s upcoming 3rd Annual “Braille of Lights,” which takes place the week before we break for the winter holidays. This event, organized by the amazing staff of the Residential Complex, is a multi-sensory experience consisting of tunnels of Christmas lights, giant walls of position peg boards with holiday-themed sensory items attached and switches recorded with holiday greetings, textured and scented ornaments, rails made of jingle bells, and a giant reindeer. At the complex courtyard during Hobby Hour students decorate cookies, engage in festive sensory activities, and frolic as a snow machine blasts snow for a playful snowball fight.

It’s no surprise that so many students brought up pumpkins when talking about Hobby Hour, as many activities during the fall months on the dorm feature them. In Fall 2021, the first year of Hobby Hour, Residential staff detailed various inspired ways to interact with the seasonal fruit:

• Carving
• Drawing, coloring, painting
• Placing them in a bin with a canvas, drizzling paint then shaking
• Exploring a variety of different gourds (shapes, sizes, weights, textures)
• Gutting pumpkin and placing seeds and pulp into a container for a sensory bin
• Baking pumpkin seeds (adding cinnamon and sugar is recommended)
• Vocalizing into a hollow pumpkin or placing a speaker inside/next to the pumpkin for some resonance
• Smashing the pumpkins the students picked out from the pumpkin patch a month prior

When Teagan described what she liked about carving pumpkins, she shared, “I think it was nice weather for it!” Indeed, Hobby Hour takes place outdoors in the large, open courtyard behind the Residential Complex, where there are ample picnic tables and turf for students to engage with each other and the materials comfortably.  Many activities center around water for refreshing sensory play. Students enjoy splashing in water tables in the Fall and Spring when the weather is hot. Residential Instructors also meticulously prepare multiple ice blocks with themed objects with various properties for students to extract using their hands and tools.

Hobby Hour activities are often tied to seasonal events. At Halloween, students reach into cauldrons with dyed spaghetti and plastic eyeballs using hands or skeleton tongs, and dig through Jell-O or slime to find small, festive, and novel items. At Valentine’s they make art for each other. Students prepare costumes and floats for an annual Mardi Gras parade every March and decorate for an annual Easter Egg Hunt. All materials for these activities are prepared by residential staff prior to student’s returning to the dorms. Just imagine and applaud the creativity and immense effort involved, not to mention the epic clean-up!

Laura Wofford, Assistant Residential Director, shared her enthusiasm about Hobby Hour, “Thank you, Danielle, for organizing and supporting this opportunity for our students! When people ask me about Hobby Hour, I tell them it is a special experience….I don’t know where else there would be an opportunity for 20 or so kids who are blind, deafblind, or have low vision to come together to laugh, create, and have fun weekly! It’s a highlight of the week for sure!”