Ideas

[Ms. Kathy]

Got an idea for teaching a totally blind child how to tie his shoes? How about tips for girl with low vision on how to apply make up? Where did you find that Braille watch? How do you do it? Find it? Learn it?

Any ideas you have or questions for ideas post them here.

[Ms. Kathy]

I had a friend whose nephew was born preemie and blind. Before the child's birth, the dad had started collecting Disney videos to share with his unborn baby when ever the child beacme old enough to view them. Of course he was heartbroken when he discovered his child would not be able to see the tapes.

I referred auntie to WGBH. They have a catalog of videos referred to as "descriptive videos" in which there is a narrator decribing the nonverbal action on the film. I have watched a few with my students. It (the narration) enhances the video for the blind and does not interfere with the story for the sighted. The cost is just a little more than what one would pay for regular videos.

I have former students who--even without this technology--never missed a movie, wrestling match or a soap opera as long as they had a sighted friend or family member describing what was going on when no one on the screen was talking. So don't believe for an instance that TV and movies are totally off limits for the blind.

Our State library has a collection of them so it is possible to check out descriptive movies from the blind and physically disabled section of one's state library section. This way a sighted partner can enjoy the movie without having to stop, think and explain what's going on and enjoy the movie with their friends.

Also for the enjoyment of narrative TV shows go to www.narrativetv.com/

Since 1988, NTN has been a leader in making television programming and movies accessible to our nation's 13 million blind and visually impaired people and their families.

[Ms. Kathy]

SPEEDY's WEB SITE!
Geocities site builder page is an excellent tool--at least for my student Matthew. Mat calls himself "Speedy" and enjoys rap, dinosaurs and snakes. So with his dad's permission we opened a geocities account where he uses large print to create his web site. Mat suffered TBI (traumatic Brain Injury) as an infant and this project has been quite motivating for him. Check it out at this link: www.geocities.com/speedy10_5/SPEEDY1.html

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Since this entry Matt has come to my high school. He announced that he discovered what some of the rappers were saying about women and violence. Another young person in youth ministry at his church had to explain it to him. So now Matt is into Christian rock--especially Kutless and Christian Rap. (He thought you'd like to know.) He's a sweet kid being brought up in a Christian home.

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UPDATE: Since Geocities closed we now use Blogger which can be set to be more secure and accessible to only those we invite to view his blog. Photos and videos can be uploaded and only those he invites can view them.

[Ms. Kathy]

DAILY LESSON PLANS form NYT
This section of the New York Times has cool lesson plans. I like the "Snap Shots" articles www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/index.html

Another idea for Braille readers is to copy the articles and work sheets and paste them into a Mega Dots document. Then they can be "Romeo-ed" or "Juliet-ed" into Braille.

[Ms. Kathy]

ANOTHER LESSON PLAN PAGE AT Discovery.com:
school.discovery.com/lessonplans/

Learn Braille on Line:
uacoe.arizona.edu/viliteracy/Braille_Lessons/lessons_view.htm

[Ms. Kathy]

Sometime last year I had a great workshop called Literacy Issues for Students with Visual Impairments. I dealt mostly with teaching braille to our children with multiple disabilities and our adults who became blind later in life.

However, with my student with low vision due to TBI, I have found some success --perhaps the most because he is a highly motivated kid. He loves the computer. We used to do a lot with JAWS but now we enlarge the view to 200% and use pt 36 font usually arial black or comic sans.
He learned to type using Talking Typer when he was in middle school. So now what we do is have him write his journal every day. You have probably seen a link to his on line journal here. We are no longer able to access it at school since geocities site editting is blocked for security reasons. So he types in MSWord and he prints a copy and saves one in his computer folder.

Whenever there is a word that he cannot spell, I had him type the word large enough for a 8" X 10" card stock sheet. Sometimes we would go over the word using the CCTV and then he'd write it on bold line writing paper using the CCTV and of course use it when writing other sentences. He liked seeing his cards stack grow because he could see how many new words he'd added to his reading vocabulary.

When we had enough words, we'd make up a story. By the end of the few weeks we had enough for a story. He was so proud of himself because he could used the CCTV to read his own book. I left room on each page for him to illustrate the book and we made copies to give to his teacher, his parents and friends.

This year we have taken that technique a step further. Once he has mastered 15 to 20 new words and can write them and spell them in a sentence without any cues, then we put them in a video using Windows Movie Maker. He can choose the color scheme, the story line and characters if there are any. The first video produced was his "Education Rap." It was a big hit among his classmates, teachers and some of the admin at school.

Since he is very motivated by rap music, he is proud of having completed about 5 videos this school year. Some of them deal with holidays, some are about a dinosaur character he made up and others are just of him talking or typing while using the words on his list.

[Ms. Kathy]

Below, please find a message from Carrie Gilmer, president of our parent’s division, describing a braille game she developed. Have a great week!

Eric Guillory, Director of Youth Services

Louisiana Center for the Blind







Greetings!



I came up with this as a new way for my Saturday School kids to have fun with Braille. Not all of my ingenious ideas stick (c’mon!-smile)-hope this one will. Try it with your kids, families and their friends at your seminars or Saturday schools, at your teen nights and student meetings or chapter meetings, with your students in school and to sighted classmates, post it on www.braille.org.



People Braille

You will need: a minimum of six people (for each cell)

A minimum of six frozen pizza cardboard circles (or cut out your own)

Tape the circles with double sided carpet tape or good old duct tape to the floor about 12 inches apart in the shape of a Braille cell

Each person represents a dot. For a “round” or game someone would be dot one always and someone dot two, etc.

For the Braille novice or learner do the alphabet

For those with grade II knowledge and depending on the size of the group take it up a notch to contractions

The leader would call out “letter A” and of course only dot one would get on the cell, “letter B” and dots one and two and so on and so forth.

You could figure a way to keep it competitive and keep score for learners, a penalty for not knowing your dot number needed to get on or off the cell for example.



I believe this has potential to be a great, fun, active way to get learners to correlate and remember dot numbers with each letter or contraction while getting a sort of mental map, repetition that is not boring works wonders for learning! It is also a great way for siblings and family and interested others to learn.



Try it and tell me how it went!





Happy Braille to you!



Carrie Gilmer, President

National Organization of Parents of Blind Children

A Division of the National Federation of the Blind

NFB National Center: 410-659-9314

Home Phone: [phone]

[e-mail]

www.nfb.org/nopbc

[Ms. Kathy]

You may not think of a movie maker as accessible to the blind but you can add student's audio on this program with microphones.
Take pictures of activities throughout the school year. Here is a link to one I made with the children I had this fall.

For Christmas, the kids decorated envelopes and I put a disk inside for each parent. The children also made one for the principal.

On the computer linked to an Elmo projection device the image could be made large enough for some of the children with low vison to see.

www.kathyskids.org/PICTUREPAGE.html

Windows Movvie Maker is standard on most PC's. Look for it under "Accessories."

[Ms. Kathy]

VIDEOS ON A BUDGET

Think you need expensive equipment? For the live actions sections of my Window MoveMaker videos I hooked up a $40 webcam and that came with a microphone. I have also use a $14 microphone.

I have let the children make their own backgrounds in the class or just use the class itself as background. Unless it is hooked up to a laptop its use is limited to indoors, though. You can see the elementary class I had last year was all shot from a webcam with a mic.

[Ms. Kathy]

It's a good idea to keep a small dry erase board so that as a Visual impairments resource person, one can write what a child's teacher has on the board. Right now I'm using one in a kindergarten class. I try to keep a black dry erase marker and a red one. You can also make dry erase by laminating a poster board or half a poster. Show the paraprofessionals how to do this and they will be using dry erase all the time for the children in the class with low vision.

The kids can use it also for writing practice.