Weekly Blog #6 - Effective VI Teaching Strategy

   This week we discussed effective teaching strategies for teaching ECC concepts to students with visual impairments.  I am not currently in a classroom, therefore I will have to draw from memory a lesson that I worked on with several of my students with multiple impairments when I taught in a center school for students with exceptional needs.
   Yearly our school participated in a county-wide economics fair. This fair was open to students of all ages and abilities throughout our district. I teamed with other teachers of special needs students in our school,  occupational therapists, and speech therapists to help our students with multiple special needs including VI to understand the concept of basic economics. This activity included creating a product, introducing basic money skills, social interactions (selling product) and organization skills, as well as helped to reinforce the skills we were teaching that correlated to our specific subjects.
   The classroom teacher presented the basic economics lesson of what it is to create a product, supply and demand, and money skills. As a professional team, we decided to help the students to create Christmas Ornaments from cinnamon dough. Similar to a cooking project, we helped students gather ingredients, create the dough, roll out the dough, use cookie cutters to make shapes, and then bake them. The texture and the smell of the dough was enticing for my students that were reluctant to do tactile tasks. It was a malleable dough that lent itself to allowing my low vision and blind students to have time to explore it while creating it.
   We then worked on understanding money skills such as identifying coins and paper money, organizing it, and counting change (if applicable). Another skill we worked on was basic advertising in which we created posters to sell the products. My students with VI worked on texture posters that the O&M specialist utilized in her lessons with them. Placed at various points around the school: the gym, the cafeteria, the front office, the therapy room; the students would locate them and then go into those areas with the product and attempt to sell them. This lead to practicing social skills: greetings, conversations, presenting the product, and gratitude for time with those they interacted with. The VI students had the added element of practicing facing who they were speaking to and practicing proper social skills.
   Participation in the economics fair project became very popular in our school for students with special needs. We placed every year in the three years I taught at that school. It was wonderful because it helped students with various ages, exceptionalities, and abilities work towards many of their IEP goals in a cooperative environment. My students with VI looked forward to this activity with anticipation every year.