Expanding Literacy

Students with vision and motor skills can make their response by pointing.

Some children will need tactual choices in order to respond.

Making Materials Accessible

Examples of how to make materials accessible to deafblind students include the use of:

• Braille
• Large print
• Tape/e-books
• Tactile pictures
• Objects or partial objects
• Signed texts
• Computer texts or tablets
• VOCA or AAC devices
• High lighting/overlay
• Reduce visual complexity
• Use of jigs
• Story boxes

A deafblind student attending the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf had a limited vocabulary in English, but recognized many picture cues and could copy written text. Her teacher developed a picture dictionary for her to help her write sentences in her weekly journal. The dictionary was arranged by categories—food, places, people, things to do, etc.—and had a photograph or Board Maker symbol beside the word typed in 18 point font. The student could find the word she was looking for and write about what happened that week. The teacher and student added new pictures and words to the book each week.

Functional Texts

Opportunities to use literacy skills in the activities of life are important for students with deafblindness because our students have direct experiences with these concepts and activities. Examples of functional texts to get you thinking include:

• Read & follow recipes (start with snack items then move to longer recipes) Seedlings Recipe Book
• Read a bus schedule (use local bus schedules for classroom practice then move to community)
• Read menu (use actual restaurant menus and enlarge or cut apart for accessibility)
• Read calendar (tactile and/or enlarged monthly/yearlong calendars)
• Movie theatre listings
• Coupons & sales
• Follow schedules (tactile, picture, print schedule)
• Newspapers (News2You)
• Read & follow map (tactile maps)
• Read & follow directions
• Medication/prescriptions labels
• Clothing size tags
• Read magazines
• "How to" sources of information
• Newsletters
• Application forms

Example of a Read Calendar.

Example of a cognitive skills wheel (below). 

Vocabulary becomes real and remembered when it is paired with experiences children have had hands-on experience with. 

Home and school can provide these experiences. In the picture above, the student's parents used real lasagna ingredients during family dinner preparations to match to vocabulary words.

A child who is deafblind gets incomplete and inconsistent information that can lead to delays in concept development and reading comprehension. Words take on richer meaning by adding sensory experiences of touch, smell and taste. The child in the picture above is tasting, smelling, feeling, experiencing his vocabulary words!

Teachers from the Georgia Academy for the Blind wanted to include literacy skills when students worked stocking extender shelves at the grocery store as part of their community-based vocational instruction. They developed an inventory book that required the students to read the item name, aisle where it is located, number of items that go on a shelf and where the item can be found in the store. The books were individualized for each student's literacy medium (braille, large print, picture cues) and were laminated so the student could write the number needed to restock and erase it to reuse it next week.

Critical Thinking Skills

After reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? by Martin and Carle, students use props, sentence strips and tactile AAC device to author and read their own stories.

Examples of Reading Materials

Literature
The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry—conservation of rain forest, endangered animals
Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner—kindness, greed, death
Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo—friendship, divorce, abandonment, faith, death, alcoholism, prison
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson—loneliness, friendship, imagination, death
A Small White Scar by K.A. Nuzum—family member with Down Syndrome, single parent  home, frustration, anger, courage

Social Stories
Speaking of Speech is the first and largest interactive forum for speech/language pathologists and teachers to improve communication skills in our schools by exchanging ideas, techniques, materials, and lessons that work, finding out about materials before you buy, seeking and giving advice on therapy and caseload management issues, and exploring a myriad of helpful resource links. Social Skills Printables from My Classroom provides lots of activities to work on social skills.

Newspaper articles
News-2-You is a weekly newspaper for students in special education classes. The standard newspaper is published with four levels of difficulty each week, so there is something to challenge every student—from beginning readers to the high school level.

Readers Theatre
Examples include:

• Helen Keller
• Reader's Theater Scripts (© 2012 Chase J. Young)

Cartoons and Graphic Novels
Make Beliefs Comix is a site that allows you to create your own comics, choosing from a library of images that express different emotions.

Journals
Examples include:

• Diary of Anne Frank
• Martin Luther King, Jr.

Examples of How to Adapt Materials

Adapting materials for readers who are blind, visually impaired, physically impaired, or intellectually disabled can provide them access to the richness of literature, and the independence of reading for information. 
To "tactilize" pictures, enlarge a picture so that it can be easily manipulated, print it on cardstock, when possible, and laminate (3 mil sheet lamination is a very strong lamination that accepts Velcro® and tactile items nicely). Velcro the tactile items to the laminated picture/symbol.
Hint: Use soft (female) Velcro® on permanent items such as desks/boards/walls and the rough (male) Velcro® on the backs of pictures/symbols/tactile items. This allows the items to be used throughout your classroom/home, on Veltex or felt boards. As the soft Velcro does not attract fuzz and dirt it also stays cleaner and looks much nicer than using rough Velcro.

Book Builder can be used to create, share, publish and read digital books that engage and support diverse learners according to their individual needs, interests and skills. 

An abstract concept, such as an emotion, may be explained though a series of pictures/tactile symbols. For example when showing how two lonely teenagers become friends, the use of space can show how two persons may be lonely, then move closer and closer to each other until they are side by side—the friendship begins.

(Example below from adapted version of Bridge to Terabithia, adapted by Jessie Moreau.)

An abstract concept, such as greed, can be illustrated through the use of a greedy cartoon villain, e.g., Snidely Whiplash, and the use of an interactive song.

Be sure each student has a way to communicate the concepts of the emotions/attitudes expressively. This can be through pictures and/or AAC devices and overlays. Tactile items should be attached with Velcro® to AAC devices for students who require tactile access.

Strategy for updating vocabulary
Updating devices and word books with new words gives students multiple opportunities to practice new words in a variety of contexts. Some great examples of this were found at the Perkins Deafblind Program, where each student had a binder full of their symbols, organized by category, so they could always find symbols they needed.

This video explains technology and accommodations for students with visual loss.