Visions of the Blind

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, there is more focus on feelings and emotions than any other time of the year. Depending on the student’s age, there are activities, worksheets, and conversations centered around feelings, friendship, emotions, and love for those around us.   Cards and candy are shared. Classmates, BFF’s, siblings, teachers, parents, boyfriends, and girlfriends all exchange small gifts to show their feelings towards one another. This is a great opportunity to teach social skills- a key component of the ECC (Expanded Core Curriculum) to those students with visual impairments/blindness. Many students with visual impairment or blindness may need help understanding emotions, feelings, and facial expressions due to missed visual cues. Students of all ages and abilities really enjoy emojis in this current technology era! Young students use charts with emojis to express how they are feeling. Older middle and high school aged students use emojis on cell ...

Holiday time for all children is very exciting: school parties filled with sugar, traveling to visit family, presents, and extra time at home. Holiday time is the PERFECT time for families to support development in the ECC (Expanded Core Curriculum) area of ADL (Activities of Daily Living) especially in the KITCHEN. Keep those little minds and hands busy over the break while having fun and building concepts! **Challenge for adults: STEP BACK when possible. Your child should be hands on during all parts of the activity by either direct touch/manipulation or utilizing hand under hand (child's hand rests on top of adult's hand). Introduce parts of a microwave by making popcorn Things to do: Apply a bump dot to the add a minute or 30 sec button Introduce to parts of the microwave allowing time for hands on exploration Have child help gather needed materials (popcorn, bowl, etc.) Picture: Bu...

                                    Picture description: Picture of 4 cut out paper turkeys with bright feathers and numbers 1-4  on their bellies lined up in a row from left to right. We all know visual efficiency skills play a role in our students with low vision. Sometimes, as TVI’s, we need to help our students learn to use the vision they have more efficiently. Visual efficiency is how an individual uses their current vision. Vision efficiency skills are a set of skills that help a student with learning tasks and understanding their environments.  Visual efficiency skills include visual discrimination, visual memory, eye-hand coordination, visual imitation, visual attention and fixation, visual closure, and visual tracking, scanning, and tracing. One of the visual efficiency skills tha...

(Picture is of a 'Sensory Turkey'. It is a Turkey shaped base with multiple feathers. Each feather has a different texture.) This week in the blog post we are going to explore different ways to expose students who are blind or visually impaired to different sensory activities of the Fall Season! Keep in mind that many of these ideas incorporate Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy Skills, so it could be fun to collaborate with other professionals on these activities!  They also can include Orientation and Mobility or Body Awareness Skills. If doing this activity with a student, always check for allergies prior to making the activity as many of the Fall recipes can include nuts, gluten, or other allergens! Since Halloween is just passed, many of you probably carved pumpkins. If you painted or left the pumpkin whole, here are some activities you can do to introduce your child to the many parts of the pumpkin. (Picture is of a divided dish with 7 compartments, 6 ...

The Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC) is toolkit that extends the academic curriculum for every person who is blind or visually impaired. Often, we find that teachers or administrators outside of our field have no idea what it is or what it does! It is important to help educate teachers, administrators and the students on all the benefits of the ECC. Another important piece of the Expanded Core Curriculum is the freedom it grants our students! By mastering these skills, students who are blind or visually impaired will have the ability to compete in academics and everyday life without feeling held back or disadvantaged.  To being, let's look at the areas of the Expanded Core Curriculum. You will notice that ECC areas are not the same as academic areas. These skills are learned through direct and repeated instruction to assist in development of skills not acquired through incidental learning. Below you will find the Expanded Core Curriculum areas with a brief description of the skills...

(Photo credit: Encyclopedia Britannica; Photo Description: A person's hands are reading the right-hand side of a braille book.) I wanted to be a veterinarian. But here I stand, a teacher of students with visual impairment and blindness and Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist. A job I never knew existed until I was 23 years old. And 18 years later, I look back and think about the twists and turns in my life that led to my discovery of this unique profession. A love for science. A dream to be an optometrist. A classmate who told me about the graduate studies program in the same building at Pennsylvania College of Optometry (now Salus University). Shadowing an orientation and mobility specialist at the Cleveland Sight Center. And the rest, as they say, is history. In the field of blindness and visual impairment, I can venture to say we are in a crisis. Although I do not have any hard-core statistics, I believe the ratio of TVI’s (teachers of students with visual i...

PAPERWORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EEEKKKK! Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork! When it is the end of the week, month, quarter and you know that paperwork is due, are you scrambling to get it done and turned in on time? This week, we will explore ways to make sure that you do not get overwhelmed or behind on your paperwork!  As we all know, paperwork can be very hard to stay current. They can also feel redundant at times, but trust me, redundancy is your friend! The repetition of information shows your employer, county or school district, and service providers that you are consistent, put together and doing what is best for the student!  Staying organized is essential to keeping up to date on paperwork. If you cannot find your paperwork, your case notes, or your jotting journal then you might not be completing your paperwork with all the information that needs to go in there. Earlier in this blog, I did a post about staying organized on the road. Having one binder or bag ...

Most Itinerant Teachers will tell you that traveling all over the place means that you basically live out of your car. This article is aimed to help you stay organized and efficient while on the road, keeping your car looking professional and clean, while being prepared for whatever can happen! First things first, you have got to be organized! This is not negotiable! Think about how wonderful it would be to just open your trunk, grab the right bin or bag and go right into a school. No more digging around for what you need. There are so many ways to make sure that this happens: Keeping a bin or bag for each school ready to be pulled when you arrive If you have a full or part-time time driver, having a travel bin or bag for each school could be difficult. You could ask to keep a bin or bag at the school, in the classroom, or the main office. You could also ask your driver to have a section of the trunk to keep your supplies. If you own the vehicle, using the entire trunk space...