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...

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...

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 ...

Greetings from the Blue Ridge Mountains! Being an itinerant teacher who travels down back country roads and up and down mountains has given me a chance to enjoy some of the most beautiful countryside in Southwest Virginia while fulfilling my passion! Since I began working for Allied Instructional Services (AIS) in 2012, I have worked in many school districts throughout the New River Valley and other areas of Southwest Virginia. My career journey has been full of twists and turns, but there’s no place I would rather be than doing what I love! It is always interesting to me how people get into the field of blindness and many never intend to, but come through unique experiences or circumstances. For me, I wanted to be an optometrist and majored in Chemistry (yes, that’s right, I LOVE science and math!) in undergrad. While in optometry school, I decide to shift gears (slightly) and got a Master’s degree from Salus University in Orientation and Mobility. After moving to Colorado, ...

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...

A few days ago, I asked some Facebook friends what they wished they knew before they started teaching. Goodness, I got some great responses! These amazing teacher friends of mine gave me my first few blog posts. This week we are going to discuss developing positive, healthy work relationships but also making sure to maintain a healthy lifestyle outside of work. This can be very hard for some people to do!   Developing healthy work relationships can be hard! Developing trust within the workplace is vital. At a recent conference I attended, one of the speakers said, "I will work harder for and with people who trust me and who I trust 100%!" When you work very closely with others, like all teachers do, you gain a sense of trust. We all have that one person at work that we bond to more than the others...that is natural. It is important to develop trust and working relationships with your co-workers. Notice that I said "working relationships", that means that you h...