I appreciate the way you tied the real life experiences with the independent living skill activities which is one of the areas for the Expended Core Curriculum.
I choose to answer to this same question but I was more focus on academic related tactile activities in the matter of learning medium of pre-braile skills in mind. However, your activities remind me these real life experience can be benefit students working on the ECC areas which including the O& M.
Thank you so much.
Rika Yamamoto
How might collaborative planning and instruction between TVIs and general education teachers be structured to ensure alignment, particularly in terms of addressing the interconnectedness of language comprehension and word recognition?
Collaboration between the TVI and regular education teachers is crucial especially when planning and supporting language comprehension, word recognition etc. This collaboration can be done in many ways and can be achieved and executed using whatever method is decided by the team. In my experience, when collaboration is executed in a great way students demonstrate significant progress in their learning of the Braille code. The TVI is able to utilize the materials that will be used for teaching word recognition in their lessons and reinforce the content that is being taught in the regular education classroom. The TVI is able to modify the materials that are utilized by the regular education teacher and present it in a way that is accessible to a student who is blind and or visually impaired. In the best scenario, collaboration continues at home with the studentâs family reinforcing the content taught by encouraging the student to read a story, practice some words for additional recognition or participate in other practice activities that allow the student to transfer their word recognition ability to other activities and see how the words can be used in other context.
@cduvnjak I enjoyed reading your post about the âsurprise concept of the dayâ idea. This sounds like such a great way to incorporate several things into a studentâs day. I bet the students really enjoyed this idea as a way of using language and seeing how language transitions to outside of a book, story and into a real life problem or situation. By asking the students what the item is used for, this allows the students to problem solve and consider how the item can be used in real life situations.
@gina.carter While reading your posts, I kept nodding in agreement with you regarding your comment of keeping the families involved in the process as much and as often as possible. Families play such a crucial role in the development of activities and follow through of what activities and lessons are being taught at home. In my experience, Iâve also worked with families to encourage them on how to create activities that are simple to more complex to allow their children to practice hands on activities and even bring some of the activities in the classroom to show the student that the reinforcement completed at home can also be used again and again while in the classroom.
Hello Jeff,
Yes, it does take time to assemble the story bags. Glad to see that your office thought ahead of time and made this a fun project for teachers during the summer.
Hello Kellie,
Unfortunately, the TVI is usually the one creating the story bags although all students would probably benefit.
As educators we can incorporate real-life experiences and tactile learning for visual impaired students in many ways, such as using a multi-modality approach to learning. To achieve this consistently throughout the school day, proper planning and projecting future lessons is crucial between the educational team. This planning will incorporate organizing tactile materials and setting up appropriate space within the classroom to access these materials. I like the idea of learning centers in the classroom because it allows students to be mobile, initiate peer learning and foster independence.
For example, if a lesson is on learning about Ecuador, the lessons should provide real life objects such as a tactile globe, a model of a volcano, tactile map of Galapagos Islands, models of animals/reptile that inhabit the region, large print books/audio books describing Ecuadorâs culture, real life artifacts, music, art, woven clothes, tapestries, leather work and cultural foods. Teachers can incorporate index cards with vocabulary words in bold print/braille, provide magnification at each center using portable cctvâs and globe/bar magnifiers. Follow up activities can be posted digitally to allow visually impaired student to access information using accessibility features.
I love the idea of field trips/visitors who can provide real life objects or opportunities for children to experience. In our district we have a great program for our HS Life-Skills program to access the community daily but we have little resources for our younger students. This year my legally blind kindergarten student felt sad during the assemblies/school plays and special visitor performances because she was unable to see. Unfortunately, many times I learned there was a performance the day of the show, leaving no time to provide tactile support or setting up the desk top CCTV to her iPad. Team planning is so important!!
Julie I learned a lot reading your post. The example of the cucumber helped me to understand how important it is to be specific breaking down each lesson. Identifying cut verses whole vegetables is a great example. It overwhelms me thinking about preparing my 1st grade studentâs reading lessons incorporating all of this important detail.
Collaborative planning for reading instruction for Braille readers is essential. It is not just one personâs job for reading instruction. The TVI should be teaching reading with new braille characters, but the student should also be receiving small group and whole group instruction in their classroom. It is essential that planning take place so that regular education teachers can understand the studentâs braille skills and strategies if the student is stuck and the TVI can understand what areas the student needs to focus and help the teacher adapt as needed. Time should be taken to look at standards and make sure the student is staying on track. Time should be taken to discussing curriculum based assessments and what accommodations make these assessments or alternate assessments appropriate for the student to test the goal of the skill, while being fair for his or her needs. Verbal phonics has been a large push in my schools lately. Weâve been pushing students into these verbal phonics class instruction times even if they are still only just learning braille letters. In my experience, they can gain the verbal and auditory phonics skills necessary to sound out words and once they know the braille characters, they are more able to apply that knowledge quickly and be successful. This background knowledge not only pairs them with their same aged peers, but gives them a baseline into sounds and blends that are essential parts to reading and writing.
This is a great example of how learning centers can be so helpful. I love the Universal Design you described, having magnifiers and things available at the center. The other students will enjoy using those tools also, even if they donât âneed themâ, and our student gets a chance to feel like they are doing the same things as everyone else. Story boxes are also great ways to incorporate background knowledge - having a bag or box full of manipulatives that goes along with the student youâre reading or listening to can be a great way to build concepts.
You make such an excellent point about collaborating also with the families. Too often we get caught up with collaboration between staff, we donât think to loop in the families and make sure they understand how to carry over. I love that you pointed out that collaboration gives you the option to use the content to reinforce concepts - like with previewing and reviewing.
I love how you are breaking down everything into different groupings. One thing you might want to consider is trying to get a friendship group together to discuss various topics. This will give your student another layer of real world vocab and interactions.
I love story boxes as wellâŚI have several set up for common stories that are often used for my early childhood group. One thing I do struggle with is classroom teachers who donât get what we are doing with the story boxes or thinking that you can put anything into the story box. I donât realize what time and effort goes into the process of the box.
4) How might collaborative planning and instruction between TVIs and general education teachers be structured to ensure alignment, particularly in terms of addressing the interconnectedness of language comprehension and word recognition?
Planning ahead and communication is crucial to the collaboration process between TVIâs and general education teachers to ensure alignment to address the interconnectedness of language comprehension and word recognition. Additionally, it is important for the TVI to know the grade level standards for the particular grade that their student is participating in. The goal is to ensure that our shared students have access to the learning experiences that are taking place in the classroom while ensuring correct supports are in place.
In a perfect world the following ideas would be beneficial to address the interconnectedness of language comprehension and word recognition. In order to achieve this goal it will be important to meet with the teacher before the school year begins. The TVI could ask for the teacherâs general plan/scope and sequence for literacy. The TVI then could plan to set up times to meet monthly/weekly with the teacher depending on the studentâs needs. TVI could build times in their schedule to work (or observe) with the student during literacy instruction to ensure the studentâs needs are being met. Once the planning and communication has been set, the focus will be on addressing the needs for language comprehension and word recognition.
To address the needs of our studentsâ language comprehension, it is important to assess where our studentâs strengths and weaknesses are in the areas of: background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. If background knowledge is a weakness then perhaps the TVI can bring in story boxes to tie into the story being read for the week. It will be important for the TVI to collaborate with the teacher to ensure that the student has hands-on learning experiences to address their weaknesses. The same idea would exist for word recognition instruction. It would be important to assess where the studentâs weaknesses are in the areas of phonological awareness, decoding, and sight word recognition. If the studentâs weakness is in the area of phonological awareness, the teacher and or TVI could give the student a hands-on experience by letting the student feel their face/lips to feel the placement when sounding out phonemes (if that would be a need for the student).
Hi Gina.
I am also an itinerant TVI and I agree that it takes the whole team to educate a student. I agree that we cannot be in the classroom at all times, so we need to work closely with the team to provide materials, ideas and strategies that our students can practice at home and in the school setting. I know in a perfect world it would be great to collaborate and plan to be a part of all the studentâs learning activities, but that is not feasible. However, it is important that we empower those who work with our students to assure that our students are receiving real life learning experiences that will enhance their reading comprehension abilities.
You provided some great ideas to integrate to provide a multi-sensory learning environment. I feel you could use these strategies and modify them to work for any grade level. I love the idea of setting up interactive learning stations. Not only would these ideas work for students with visual impairments, but they would help enhance every childâs learning. As an itinerant TVI, I could see where this may be difficult to incorporate on a regular basis. However, it would be nice to collaborate with the classroom teacher to try out some of these ideas/strategies when given some support from the TVI.
Hello Sharon! Thank you for sharing the link to the Paths to Literacy Story Box Ideas. Our school has created some story boxes for checkout. Your response made me think about The Braille Institute as they used to have this Special Collection where you could select a couple of book titles and the book had a manipulative that represented a concept in the book or character. Iâm not sure if they still do this.
By collaborating with the general education teachers TVIs are able to introduce new vocabulary and any sight words ahead of time. If there are any words that need to be decoded, they can be introduced and practiced also, by doing this we can catch any trouble areas and work with the general education teacher to focus on the trouble areas throughout the upcoming lessons.
I agree with you regarding the importance of meeting with general education teachers prior to the start of the school year. When I was in the public schools I had the opportunity to schedule meetings prior to the school year starting, and during the school year meetings were often as needed, but communication occurred multiple times a week. I requested materials and lessons a week before they were going to be used in the classroom which allowed me time to prepare my student with background knowledge for any upcoming content, introduce new words to ensure an understanding of the vocabulary and the ability to recognize new sight words or decode words.
In my current role as an itinerant outreach TVI/COMS across a large geographic area I have to depend more on other staff within the schools I serve to follow through with some of these things which can be more challenging at times.