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Strategies to promote literacy for children with blindness or visual impairment: Provide a variety of hands-on, meaningful experiences. Children learn best through real-world experiences in which they can have a direct, first-hand understanding of something and not just a verbal explanation.
- Share your love of reading by reading aloud with your child every day. Choose times and places that are quiet, comfortable and free of distractions. For a child with visual impairment, the sounds of other children playing, the washing machine going or background music can make it difficult for them to focus on the story.
- Choose books that relate to the child’s own experience. Regular activities such as bath time, visiting grandma or going to the grocery store are activities your child may be familiar with, and can make the story much more interesting to them.
- Use interactive language to make the story more engaging and meaningful. You can say things like, “Jose went to the grocery store in this book. Do you remember when we went to the grocery store yesterday?”
- Use objects to support the story. You may feel sad that your child is missing out on the beautiful illustrations in a story book – but you can go one better and use actual objects to illustrate the story that your child can touch and hold.
If your child has little or no usable vision, they will probably be learning to read and write in braille. Braille is a code—a system of dots representing the letters of the alphabet that your child can use to read independently and write down their own ideas.
Feb 20, 2024 · Get useful tips and ideas from the RNIB to help you support blind or partially sighted children in school. Across the UK, it's estimated that around 25,000 children aged 0-16 have a vision impairment: that's 2 children out of every 1000 who may require a high level of specialist provision to learn on equal terms with their sighted peers*.
Children with typical vision have an added advantage in the process of learning to read over young children who are blind or who have significant visual impairment. Sighted children can learn about things even if they have had no direct contact with them—animals, events, people, and objects—except through the illustrations in their books.
Reading. While a parent of a sighted child might run their finger under words while reading the sounds aloud, the caregiver of a blind child would move the child’s hand to touch braille letters while speaking them aloud. This is important even for very young children, to begin associating touch with words.
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Blind or partially sighted children may be able to read print or large print, sometimes with the help of specialist equipment. Most books for younger children have large print but size isn’t the only factor that affects how easy it is to read. Try looking for: • Contrasting colours for print and background (e.g.