http://www.ohsu.edu/oidd/d2l/our_pro/FTF.html
by Charity Rowland, Ph.D., and Philip Schweigert, M.Ed.
See also www.designtolearn.com
http://www.tsbvi.edu/Outreach/deafblind/ideas.htm
Texas School for the Blind & Visually Impaired
Deafblind Outreach
http://www.tsbvi.edu/Outreach/newsletter/winter08/winter08.pdf
By Sara Kitchen, Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Outreach
(Educational consultant for students with visual impairment)
http://www.nationaldb.org/NCDBProducts.php?prodID=97
By Kathee Scoggin
"We can't get him to DO anything."
"We spend most of the day calming her down from tantrums that disrupt the whole class."
If either of these sound familiar, consider that:
Lack of connection and consistency can lead children to develop a passive or protesting attitude toward just about everything.
A combination of strategies can allow a student to move from passive to active, from protesting to tolerating, and eventually, to learning. These strategies include:
By Kathee Scoggin
When informally assessing a child's abilities, use something you know the child likes. He's more likely to be interested and motivated. When using items unfamiliar to the child, the tester is no longer assessing the skill or knowledge, but how quickly the child can use both his intact and impacted senses (vision and hearing) to figure out what the object is and what to do with it.
(A reminder: generalizing from one setting to another can be a real challenge. Children with deaf-blindness have gaps in their concept development of things as familiar as cold, soft, long, longer.)
In order for the child to demonstrate what she knows, the assessment must include things she knows and likes. If she has a dog at home and loves dogs, does she know about feeding the dog? Does she know that dogs have eyes, ears, nose and mouth, just like people? The child has developed at least one concept around whatever she likes or dislikes. It might be a basic concept of "spin," or "dog," or "battery." She may know that her favorite song is fast and another song is slow. Using concepts she already has as a bridge to new concepts leads to more meaningful and effective learning.
We can learn a lot about a child's skills and cognition by watching how she engages with something or someone she knows and enjoys. We need to watch how she solves simple problems.
"Understanding a child's interests and preferences is key to the assessment of his competencies..."
- Charity Rowland, Assessing Communication and Learning in Young Children Who are Deafblind or Who Have Multiple Disabilities
www.nationaldb.org/newPublications.php?eCat=217