August 2017

Somebody had to do it. So Jamie Principato decided she would take the skills she’d learned and taught herself as a blind Physics student involved with a Colorado Space Grant rocket project and teach them to other blind students.

That’s where the idea of BLAST came from – Blind Learning All Skills Too launched on August 10 with the express purpose of teaching other blind people the skill of soldering small electronic devices, the precursors of instruments like those Principato and other students at Arapahoe Community College (ACC) built earlier to send high into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Quite a few, it turns out.

Staff and students held an Eclipse Party to celebrate and enjoy the 92 percent coverage of the sun today. Students in Home Management prepared a black bean salsa and cookies to start things off about 10:30 this morning as we took time to learn a little more about the eclipse.

Among our tools was the recently published Getting a Feel for Solar Eclipses, published by NASA. It featured tactile (and colorful) graphics of a solar eclipse and a tactile map of the United States depicting the path of totality.

More than 70 people stopped by the Colorado Center for the Blind on Monday for a tour, and we’d like to send out a big “Thank you!” to all of you!

This is the third year we’ve opened our doors for tours as part of Littleton’s Western Welcome Week. We’re always excited to meet new neighbors who want to find out what we’re all about. This year, we even had some who returned for a second time!

So, thanks to all who came and if you couldn’t make it, we’ll be part of WWW next year too – and we’ll see you in the parade on Saturday!

We’re excited to open our doors to the Littleton community once again during Western Welcome Week. We will give tours to all comers between 3 and 7 p.m. today. Our students will be in their classes and staff will talk about what we teach in each area – Braille, Cane Travel, Home Management, Technology and Wood Shop. We’ll also show visitors our gym with exercise stations and goal ball court, and have stops to learn about our art and STEM programming.