Many people are having to shelter in place due to the coronavirus making its rounds. You may ask, “What do I do with my special needs child?” as you are used to having a Teacher of the Visually Impaired and/or other specialist work with them. You know they need an education, but how do you give them it? What can you do to ensure they continue learning in this time of craziness?
I would start by looking at their individual education plan (IEP). Find out what goals and objectives the student has and see what activities you can do to work towards the child meeting those goals. The goals were set in place at the last meeting, so you should be familiar with them.
You can also contact your district’s vision teacher for ideas.
On my IEP’s, you’ll almost always find some sort of reading goal. Sometimes it’s working on braille and learning it, sometimes it’s just building fluency. These goals are fairly important, but easy enough (with some practice) to work on. I always hope the parents spend 20 minutes a day (or more) working on this goal. Hopefully, your TVI sent home some flashcards with the students that can be used to learn the braille code.
Methods:
1. Game-start with three or four flashcards. Make sure the student knows over half of the cards, one partially, and one unknown. As the child reads them, they “steal” them from you when they get it right. Keep cycling through until they have the partially known one down well and the unknown one down better. Make a big deal out of the fact they stole all the cards and you lost. Start over but introduce one more card. Slide out one of the ones they already know really well. This game is a favorite (even with older students (just make it more challenging)).
2. Picture walk-with students who are new to reading or young and are still at the stage of books having pictures, go through the book ahead of time with your student and describe the pictures. If you can, give them an example that is as real as possible (if it’s about a car, go explore your car).
3. Read the book to them. Just read. Make commentary about what you are reading from time to time, be silly with it if they are at that age, have fun. If they are older, start a good discussion based on what you read. Don’t worry, it usually comes up of its own accord if you are commenting from time to time on what you are reading.
4. Have them follow you as you are reading. Stay slow if they are a slow reader so that they are no more than a word behind and stop if you see them get stuck.
5. Choral read-read together following the child’s lead.
6. Read, stop, the other person takes over for a bit, stop, the other person takes over for a bit.
7. Reread the same passage of words (maybe 60) at just below reading level to start with until they improve their time significantly.
8. Just read.
Those are all things you can do while we are on break to improve your child’s reading and have them even more prepared for going back to school when we can.