Webinar 1: Concept Development

Expanded Core Curriculum Foundations for Tactile Literacy
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I told a student they were in the front of the line only to learn they did not know what a line is.

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One of my students didn’t know that tree bark could be smooth or rough. We ran right outside and explored the variety of tree that were on the campus.

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A student could not generalize that a Hershey’s Kiss was candy.

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I just had this conversation with a Pre-K team this morning for one of our DB students

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One of my favorite was taking a student outside when it was snowing actively. The student never knew that the snow fell from the sky, always assumed it emerged from the ground.

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I had a student who the teacher gave them a foam bus to represent bus. The student was totally blind. We suggested a piece of the seat belt to represent going home.

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I once assumed a learner grasped a basic concept during an ECC lesson. We were discussing organizing our closets and choosing clothing items for different occasions. I mentioned the different colors of her skirts and how they matched different tops in her closet, and she said, “What are skirts?” I repeated, “A skirt?” The student did not know the name of the clothing item, despite having multiple in her closet. This taught me the importance of regular assessments and open communication. It’s vital to check assumptions, adjust teaching methods, and maintain ongoing feedback channels to ensure learners truly understand.

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I see this often when kids are playing on the playground with same age peers.

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Yes! It’s surprising sometimes how many gaps there are in my students learning because so much is picked up by incidental learning and it is just assumed that everyone knows the informations. My student would take apart her pizza slice and her sandwiches because no one told her how to eat them.

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We were supposed to be teaching “the emotional toolbox.” I quickly found out that my students had no idea what a REAL toolbox was.

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In my early teaching I asked a student to put a recipe ON the fridge. I had left magnetic clips on the door of the fridge. Later I looked for the braille recipe only to find it ON TOP of the fridge.

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Related question–does a child, even an older child, sometimes learn to mimic sighted responses? To seem to have concept development based on memorization of a few labeled parts of a thing, but not really have learned it? My student with CVI wasn’t diagnosed till age 12, and says she thought everyone was just pointing themself toward the thing being discussed, and nodding/seeming to know what it is.

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That has happened to me with vocabulary. A student didn’t understand a common word that I considered basic. In a second example, a student didn’t understand how to use the word “itch” correctly, even though everyone experiences it.

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YES! My student ordered French fries at McDonald’s and the person behind the counter and asked, “What size”, and he responded - “the long ones”! He did not understand that fries came in different portion/container sizes!

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from a friend: A teacher was quite proud of self describing how to put a cup on for sports to protect boys. She forgot the part that it goes under the student’s athletic shorts. So remember the details folks. That poor boy was so embarassed.

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I think concept development is important to help you understand graphics and how the pieces all relate together. I think about students with CVI learning “salient features” of something but if they don’t have ideas about top/bottom left/right, it could be confusing to understand how all the parts come together.

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My daughter was scared that the dentist was telling her there are “sugar bugs” in her mouth that needed to be cleaned. The dentist was making a cute metaphor (?) and my daughter was very concerned about what we hadn’t told her about bugs in the mouth.

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Student wrote an essay about a character stepping outside of an airplane and flying the plane while standing out on the wing.

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39

I recall my students not wanting to touch a “Spider Plant” because they would be touching spiders.

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I had a parent make the connection about concept development related to trains. They would drive over a train yard daily to school. After chatting with the mom, she realized that her son probably had been thinking that the train yard was full of wooden toy trains, not the freight trains she was referring to.