How to Teach Visually Impaired Children to Read

Braille helps blind children read.

Educating disabled people, while especially challenging, is at the same time enormously rewarding. Teaching visually impaired children requires an open heart and a tremendous capacity to empathize and communicate. You need various teaching techniques to teach the type of reading a disabled person must learn. Learning to read a book, for example, demands a different form of instruction than learning math. Mastering techniques to help blind or visually impaired children to read is a wonderful way to illuminate a life, one child at a time.

Things You'll Need

• Braille cells
• Cassette or CD player
• Abacus
• Braille structures

Instructions

1. Teach literary Braille to a student wanting to read a book. Instruct students to glide their fingers along Braille patterns to form words and sentences. Braille is a physical means of reading, requiring the blind or visually impaired person to press and feel a coded paper cell. Each series contains six bumps -- 26 series in all -- and is composed in a specific way to represent a letter of the alphabet.

2. Teach music Braille to a child learning to read sheet music. Encourage students to glide their fingers along music Braille patterns to learn notes and stanzas. Play audio musical notes in conjunction with music Braille instruction to reinforce the learning of each note. Music Braille is similar to literary Braille -- each alphabetic series contains six bumps -- although each series represents a single musical note. Music Braille is the only internationally unified code form of Braille, according to the National Federation for the Blind.

3. Teach math to a visually impaired child using an abacus. An abacus is an ancient, framed adding tool with five rows of cylinder rails and beads. The top row of single beads is 10 beads long. The top row is separated by the bottom four rows, each of which is also ten beads long. Each bean in the top row signifies a multiple of 5; bottom rows signify multiples of 10. Numbers can be created from small to large amounts by adjusting beads from right to left. The upper-right-hand bead on the top layer of the bottom row represents 1. The bead directly to the left of this bead represents 10, and so on. Abacus instruction is now being enhanced by three-dimensional hand-held sculptures representing parts of basic equations.

References

• Blind Merchants: Tools for the Visually Impaired
• National Federation for the Blind: Tools for the Visually Impaired
• Science Daily: Tools for the Visually Impaired
• Think Quest: Using an Abacus