Every time I go through my daughter’s work from school I find at least one thing that makes me appreciate the work the VI specialists at school do to make the coursework all the other children can “see” into something my daughter can consume. She’s not learning disabled, she has a sensory impairment. As long as the material can be presented to her in a way she can consume, she can easily do the work.
Today’s stack of school work didn’t disappoint. The students were learning how to use a map. Here’s the photocopied single sheet the other students in her class had for their assignment.
Note that the answers have been filled in on the sheet. That’s what my daughter wrote on a separate sheet of braille paper. Her braillest fills in the print on the original sheet a lot of times. It probably took my daughter all of ten minutes to read the questions, find the locations on the map, put a sheet of blank paper in her braille writer, add her name and date to the top and then write the five written answers below. But how did she know what the map looked like?
She knew, because her braillest spent I don’t know how much time, putting together this tactile version of the map so she could “feel” her way around the map, including a separate sheet with a key.
Because the buildings are raised by using white foam, my daughter could easily draw the path from one location to the other to answer questions five and seven.
When I say I am humbled by the amount of time it takes my daughter’s specialist teachers to create the work they do for her to just be able to complete a single, simple worksheet, I mean it. They are heroes to my husband and me. They are giving my daughter the education we would have no idea how to do. And they do this every single day as evidenced by the two inch stack high of school work she sent home from last week alone.
The Big Boy Update: My son had a meltdown today. We have a screen time issue. It is my son’s highest and most valuable reward, and my husband and I don’t mind him having some screen time, be it playing a video game or watching a show. But when time is up, time is up. Today, like all other days, he set a timer with Alexa to let him know when the half-hour was up. When the time came he lost it. He was mad. He was incensed. Alexa clearly didn’t know how to keep time. We worked it out but unfortunately he lost additional screen time he’d accrued due to behavior and attitude. I should have fed him after school; he wanted to wait for dinner. I should have known better than to let him go without calories.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter has music on Mondays. Her best friend next door, Madison, loves to join her for music class and since the main goal for her is to have some purposeful fun, we don’t mind as long as Chelsea doesn’t mind. And Chelsea is rather a saint when it comes to two excitable girls and music. They ran downstairs this afternoon adorned in all of Chelsea’s colored scarves, saying they were fairies. Apparently they had done interpretive dance to some classical pieces. Chelsea said they each had different interpretations of the songs, each showing quite a lot of imagination.
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