Accommodations

My daughter has a lot of accommodations in school to help her due to her vision impairment.   As one of her teachers said, “she isn’t handicapped, she has a sensory impairment.   She’s very mentally capable if we can just present her the information in a format she can consume.”

And we’re starting to see how that’s playing out in the materials she’s bringing home.   For instance, the class has sets of “sight words” they’re working on each week.   If my daughter could see the large bold letters I can guarantee you she would recognize the patterns and know the words easily, especially after seeing letters all her life.   But since she can’t see and can’t read faster than one letter at a time—in braille which she’s learning—she’s having a longer time learning initially.

Her teachers realized she’s guessing and not really reading the words so they’ve backtracked her to get a better foundation.    From a braille typing perspective, she can type the letters and make the words, she’s just having some challenges reading the letters with her fingers.   And heck, folks, I can’t read them myself.  I can read the braille words faster by visually looking at the little raised dots, but my fingers are completely lost.   We’re not worried though; once she’s able to read with her fingers she’s going to easily catch back up.

Another accommodation is in the materials the students are doing that can’t be seen by my daughter in the traditional way.   Here’s an example:

This is to work on fine motor skills with writing/drawing.   My daughter would be great at this if she could see because she holds a pencil/crayon properly from her Montessori school years, but since she can’t see it the following was prepared for her by her in-classroom VI teacher:

It’s hard to see, but the teacher has recreated the triangles and squares in braille dots and surrounded each section with a braille dot rectangle.   Then she’s used a bright contrasting marker to outline the shapes.    My daughter had to feel for the dots with her right hand and then draw along them with her left hand (she’s left-handed).    This is tricker than it sounds and my daughter can draw much better than it would appear from the above, but she was learning to follow lines in this work.

The page you see above is one of many such accommodations we see come home each week.   It’s very impressive how much time goes into helping my daughter, and we are grateful for all of it.

The Big Boy Update:  We went to a sushi restaurant tonight.   My son had a bowl of white rice with his meal and in it he found a very tiny fish bone.   And he was excited.  He held on to it the entire meal and he wanted to know if he could take it home with him.   My husband’s putting the children to bed right now but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s taken it to bed and is still holding on to it in the morning. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My children got home today from visiting with Nana and Papa for the weekend.   When they came into the house we told them there was a lemonade stand around the corner. My daughter was quite excited to go.   We told her we had to find some quarters before we could walk over, but this wasn’t fast enough for her.   She complained loudly, “come on, I’m not patient!”