I love your idea of incorporating it in a center. It also gives regular education peers the opporunity to experience the learning materials and the materials are not labeled as being just for the “blind kid”. Some regular education peers may not have background knowledge in the same are that the visually impaired child. This type of center would allow the children to have shared experiences and provide a great opportunity for integration. It creates an avenue for the children to have conversations which may not have otherwise occurred due to the isolation that children with special needs sometimes face.
Oh, how I wish I had an easy answer to this question! 25 years of teaching students with visual impairments and collaborative planning is the hardest. Our time is limited and it invariably seems that when I am at the school the teacher isn’t there! Their time is precious too and I realize they are responsible for a classroom of students while I am concerned about 1 student! I have had teachers tell me they don’t do email!!!
When we talk about the interconnectedness of language comp and word recognition I think it is vital that students have writing journals and prompts. I have seen too many students who just dictate because writing is hard. I have seen students who could read words but couldn’t string them together in a coherent sentence.
I like this idea! I like how much you can incorporate into this activity! Not only what the whisk does but where you could find it and where you use it. I thought about the fact that I have one whisk stored in a drawer and another in a utensil caddy!
I also learned about another similar idea when introducing “letter of the week” in preschool. I had my husband build a box where we could store items that start with that letter. For instance, a balloon could be for “b”. What can you do with a balloon? What does it feel like? The list goes on! I had one ELL student that I rummaged through my house for real items - such as a suitcase with shoes, slippers, socks, sandals, etc. We had lots of fun exploring and he would tell me the name in Arabic and then I would tell him in English and he would braille it.
Cooking lessons and field trips are the best! I had one student who finally got interested in “reading” a book when I made it all about her experience at a concert. I will always remember another low-vision middle school student who went away for an Independent Living weekend and when he came back I asked him what he learned. He answered, “I learned that ovens have racks”. I was kind of taken aback because I thought he had that information. He told me that his mom never let him do anything near an oven and to him it was just a big black box. I thought about his reading comprehension if he ever read a recipe that said “place on the top rack”
Question 2: In what ways can educators incorporate real-life experiences and tactile learning activities to help students with visual impairments build their background knowledge and vocabulary skills, thus enhancing their reading comprehension abilities?
I work with a range of high school-aged students presenting with a range of low-incidence disabilities: blindness and visual impairments, hearing impairments, cognitive deficits, communication disorders, behavioral challenges, intellectual disabilities, autism, CVI, physical impairments, and learning disabilities. I teach Expanded Core Curriculum–vocational training within Horticulture-based work environments, on-campus and community-based. This year, I focused on enhancing vocational training opportunities with some ELA elements, to incorporate reading activity with related hands-on horticulture-based projects. With the help of our special literacy team, we worked together to provide reading activities to foster more background knowledge, as my students read a story related to the plants they prepared for their floral sale project. I incorporated enriching ELA activities to add another opportunity for students to learn about the plant world and how it relates to real-world vocational settings (ie: flower/plant shop), At the same time, students targeted other important skills with sales, including math (calculation-pricing) and communication/social (speech/language).
I am grateful to be taking this Summer COHORT to further enhance my classroom in the upcoming academic year. At times, I co-teach with SLP’s to focus on strategies to engage my students in group dialogue. We work in tandem to find new ways to guide and encourage students to explore/identify natural materials and adaptive tools/devices as they complete a range of vocational tasks. We use tactile materials to introduce new vocabulary terms for students to learn vocational concepts. It is essential to work with other team members to provide greater opportunities for students to practice many skills throughout their day. One of the highlights this year was a discussion I had with a new floral design student. She never realized she would be learning new vocabulary terms to identify materials and tools she used in class. She also was surprised that key elements of floral design were based on math and scientific terminology, as she created her floral arrangement. Literacy is the basis of learning within vocational training opportunities, so it is important to incorporate a range of strategies within our “vocational teacher tool box.”
Gina, I applaud your effort, as you travel from one school to another throughout your week. Though, I would like to say that even I, teaching in one school, seemingly face similar issues as yourself. I often wish I could have certain students more than once or twice a week, but they are tasked with many therapies and academics, which often results in limited exposure to vocational training opportunities. I think about the need for students to learn more “background” and how important this becomes to create more foundation for key concept development in our instructional repertoire. I support what you say regarding the importance of real objects and tactile experiences to help model important life skills for our students to establish these real-world experiences.
-Marion Myhre
Hello there mhopkin!
I totally relate to what you mentioned about the use of the KWL chart, a useful tool to organize a student’s progression through their learning process. I have used this with students who are just beginning in my vocational training classes. It is essential to find out what a student might understand about the key concepts of “employment”. More often, my students do not have a lot of experience earning money, they are often given a debit card, so they do not comprehend the relevance of earning a stipend/salary for the work they perform within the work setting. Building upon their “background knowledge” is key to teaching them the importance of paid vs. unpaid work experience (volunteer vs. employee). Also, learning that it is important to “show up” for work when assigned a job out in the community which is such a challenging concept for our students to grasp. Through the KWL chart, the student can visualize a progression from their preliminary background throughout their vocational journey, as they learn essential soft and hard skills they must acquire within their work environments. To work on our students’ background knowledge as Malinda Bachelor highlights, is key to language acquisition and comprehension. Thanks for sharing these key points.
-Marion Myhre
- In what ways can educators incorporate real-life experiences and tactile learning activities to help students with visual impairments build their background knowledge and vocabulary skills, thus enhancing their reading comprehension abilities?
Whenever possible, I love to incorporate lessons involving real objects that students are discussing in their general education classrooms. If they are reading about apples, I will bring in several apples for the student to explore in a pull out session. We can discuss the different colors of apples one might find, and if appropriate have an apple tasting. I also love to take community trips that reinforce classroom materials (as an O&M I am able do this fairly frequently). SIghted peers are able to take in SO much information incidentally. I try to provide as many opportunities as possible for my students to build real-life experiences using other sensory modes to help support what they miss out on due to vision issues.
I LOVE how many opportunities for your students were embedded in your floral sale project! I feel like many skills (reading, math language) make much more sense to students when used in a meaningful way. I imagine this will be a project your students remember for years.
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Collaborative planning is definitely an area of struggle! I cannot imagine attempting it without email. That is often my best route to share information without trying to steal the teacher from their class time while I am on campus as an itinerant. When my schedule allows, which is rare, I do try to schedule a consult session during the student’s grade level planning time. It helps me stay aware of what they will be covering so I am aware of what I will need to adapt for my student. But like I said, I know that is not always feasible given our caseload requirements.
In what ways can educators incorporate real-life experiences and tactile learning activities to help students with visual impairments build their background knowledge and vocabulary skills, thus enhancing their reading comprehension abilities?
Incorporating real life experiences and tactile learning activities is so important with our kiddos that have visual impairments. If they don’t have experiences of putting their hands on something tangible, it is so much harder to draw knowledge from the subject. For instance, in science class a child can be told a million times that a stream has moving water in it and is found in nature, but a student that does not have the ability to see a picture of the stream may not understand that the water isn’t like water for a pool and that their could be leaves and sticks floating down it. This may not be something that is thought to be shared with students because it can seem obvious to sighted peers. If the science teacher were to be able to incorporate a quick trip outside after a rain storm, a child could put their hands on an actual stream and understand that the water is moving at various speeds, and things could be in it, and there is nature all around it. Descriptions of items are great, but nothing beats the real thing and this will ultimately expand the child’s understanding of a topic increasing their compression abilities.
Hi emckinney, I love what you said about community trips. I am also an O&M and it is so fortunate when you get the lightbulb moment to go off in a student when they get to experience a real life object that they thought would have felt so different. With our students they miss out on so much incidental learning and everything has to be purposeful. It is so important to expose them to real life objects whenever possible!
Hi Brenda, I think a writing journal is such a great idea. I incorporate this with some of my students that need typing practice. I let them chose the topic and then they still get to practice the skills that I need them to. This task can be harder than you would think for some students, because like you said, many students rely on dictation.
In what ways can educators incorporate real-life experiences and tactile learning activities to help students with visual impairments build their background knowledge and vocabulary skills, thus enhancing their reading comprehension abilities?
Background knowledge is an important standing stone in order to understand the meaning of words and thus building understanding of a series of words like a passage. For our students with visual impairments, many do not always have many experiences that allow them to build this background information or even make connections to concepts they may have heard before on TV or reading. By providing more solid and real life experiences through tactile learning we can help these children start to build their background knowledge.
Educators can use real life objects or models of objects to go along with books (ie. an apple, an apple cut in half, the seeds for a book on apples). Then later incorporate it with other examples that use the object (such as an apple pie or apple sauce for an apple). Not only is using real life objects or models of objects important, but incorporating the object into discussions is important too. Things that can have multiple meanings or can have different appearances such as a bear or a cat. There are many different types of bears and cats.
Exposure to new things allows our students to get the experiences they need in order to make the connections. For some of my low vision students, if they do not recognise what I am talking about, I show them a picture on my interactive whiteboard and discuss what they look like.
I agree with you! While some students have the experiences to back up what they know, many do not. It sounds like the metaphorical student has heard of a stream, but does not have the experience to understand that the water isn’t like a swimming pool water. The experience of going out to feel a stream is great to do, but if you cannot get near the real thing, you can see about borrowing a draining board (I think it’s the name) from a local watershed group. It is basically an example of drainage from streets and roads to a river and you can put water into it to show what happens and the student could put their hand in the way of the water to feel it.
Collaborative planning can be great, especially if you are able to work together. It takes time to build a great rapport, but I agree with you on the importance of this. Simply showing pictures as you said doesn’t cut it for many of our students. To be able to work together to adapt things like pictures is vital in helping our kiddos learn vocabulary.
Thank you for your example using the horse. More examples help when explaining such use of functional vision to parents and at CSE meetings. I agree, background knowledge through real experiences really varies in our students. Creating such moments in an itinerant setting is challenging. My favorite thing to do as an itinerant tvi is to go along with my students during their class field trips. They are great ways to close the gaps that exists in their conceptual development.
I completely agree with you in that reading is the whole team’s job. Despite a lot of trainings, in services with the classroom teachers and modeling strategies like the use of real objects, I find classroom teachers don’t have the time to individualize the small group or whole group reading instruction for my braille reader. It’s definitely challenging to always feel that because I wasn’t providing the instruction in that moment, my students conceptual awareness of the topic was not developed.
What a powerful moment for your student. Sometimes we don’t realize the details that our learners are missing. By middle school, we may assume that our students have an understanding of the consistent objects in their environments, such as an oven. You make a good point that it could impact his reading comprehension. It can also lead to difficulty completing a life skill like following a recipe or cooking for himself.
It is important to implement collaboration between the TVI and general education teacher as soon as possible. Ideally, before the start of the school year. Planning doesn’t occur when school starts, it has been in the works. I would extend the collaboration to include any related services as well. Does the student receive Speech services or reading support? They would also be important to include in the discussion so that everyone working with the student is reinforcing the strategies used in the classroom. Understanding the order in which instruction will be occurring in the classroom would be helpful to align braille instruction. I utilize Building on Patterns for braille instruction. It does a wonderful job of introducing or reinforcing skills being taught in the classroom. However, the order could be adjusted to the student’s needs. Do they need preteaching, reinforcement, or both for the most success? Knowing the student and being able to respond based on the collaborative efforts of the IEP team will benefit the student. The logistical factors of meeting for collaboration can become daunting. Determining a schedule at the start of the school year would be helpful. Having the time dedicated to purposeful collaboration will help to prioritize it vs. trying to fit it into busy schedules.