How we teach & train visually impaired children
Over the years, studies in child development, sociology, and special education have led educators enlightened to the conclusion that the children with visual impairment grow, flourish, and achieve greater self and social fulfilment by being nurtured in the least restrictive environment. Through proper education, supported by well-prepared specialists, the children may enjoy everyday common experiences essential to the development of a keen awareness of the realities of the world around them.
The unit Visual Impairment is one of the important part of SEN and it was started in April 2016 with two students aged 7 a boy and a girl having 100% visual impairment have been taken on full scholarship, where the school management has been extremely kind to provide them with all the required facilities. A trained teacher for Braille and Taylor-frame has been appointed for this cause. These students need more than core academics. Here we prepare or train a visually impaired child in such a way so that they can be easily integrated with the regular children in future. In this unit we provide the same opportunities and educational experiences for visually impaired children as those provided for regular children. The different areas on which we work are: language development, sensory training, ADL’s, computers, orientation and mobility, Braille ( The students use Braille for reading and writing and we have a number of Braille books available of which some have been purchased from market and some are written by the teachers according to the need of student),Taylor frame (it is used for mathematics) etc. In order to clear their concepts we try to focus on their tactile skills to make them feel the real objects or things followed by making models of the same and make use of tactile
books made by the teachers.
Visually Impaired students require tactile inputs to understand and memorize the concepts well. Keeping this in consideration, the IT/CS department of SEN prepared tactile material for V.I according to the latest material and software’s of 2017. The images shows Windows 7 operating system representing its layout such as start pop up menu, all programs, desktop view, icons and system folders. Second image is of Microsoft word where we are representing menus, subtasks, scroll bars, tile bar and work space, so that a student can touch and feel it and can get a real experience of how actual Microsoft word looks like and finally the third image is of Google search engine representing tabs, address bar, close, restore, minimize, search box, language links, buttons and so on.
Students have already started using them and are enjoying it as well.
