SENSORY EFFICIENCYBy: Carmen Willings
teachingvisuallyimpaired.com Sensory efficiency skills includes instruction in the use of residual vision, hearing and other senses including use of tactual, gustatory, and olfactory input to identify one's personal possessions, or use hearing and other senses to identify people. Areas the student may need instruction in or consultation in include maximizing their use of vision, developing gross motor skills, developing fine motor skills, developing strength, stamina, and endurance in legs, arms, and hands, identifying textures tactually and underfoot, identifying kinesthetic and proprioceptive sources and identifying olfactory sources. |
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Visual Efficiency Skills
This page provides an overview of skills for visual efficiency. These include visually attending, tracking, shift of gaze, scanning, visual discrimination, visual motor and visual closure.
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Visual Attend & Scan Activities
Visual attending skills are important skills in laying a foundation for all other vision skills. This page provides suggestions and strategies for helping students visually attend and scan.
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Visual Tracking Activities
Visual tracking skills skills will help a student read as well as prepare them for safe and efficient travel. This page provides suggestions for encouraging students to use their vision to the highest extent possible.
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Visual Discrimination Activities
Visual discrimination is the ability to recognize details in visual images. It allows students to identify and recognize the likeness and differences of shapes/forms, colors and position of objects, people, and printed materials. This page provides visual discrimination activities.
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Visual Motor Activities
Visual motor skills are the skills to coordinate eyes and feet as well as eyes and hands. It is the coordination of vision with the movements of the body. A student with a visual impairment may need assistance in developing and facilitating gross motor movement, pointing to a destination or object, and in performing fine motor activities. This page provides visual motor activities.
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Optical Device Use
Many students who have visual impairments will be print readers and will use print as their primary mode of communication. The teacher of student with visual impairments (TVI) will assess the student's functioning and determine what non-optical devices will assist a student in accessing print and instruct the student in the proper use and care of the devices.
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Low Vision Device Activities
Many students who have visual impairments will be print readers and will use print as their primary mode of communication. This page provides activities that can help students learn how to use low vision devices in order to access print.
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Tactual Readiness
The development of tactual exploration and discrimination skills are necessary for future braille readers as well as for students who may not be able to learn formal braille, but can learn to discriminate objects by touch to help make sense of their world or to use for communication. This page lists the general order of the development of tactual skills.
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Developing Skillful Hands
All students need to develop strength and dexterity to complete everyday tasks. It is important for students to manipulate materials and develop their fine motor skills. This page provides suggestions on ways to develop skillful hands.
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Auditory Readiness
Listening skills are important for everyone, but especially for students who are blind or visually impaired. This page provides strategies in developing a students auditory readiness, a skill needed to lay a foundation for listening skills.
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Listening Skills Instruction
Since listening skills will be a major source of information for a student who is blind or visually impaired, it is important to develop good listening skills when the child is young. This page provides strategies for developing listening and auditory skills.
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Listening Skills Activities
Since listening skills will be a major source of information for a student who is blind or visually impaired, it is important to develop good listening skills when the child is young. The following are some listening skill activities to use with students.
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If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn. -Ignacio 'Nacho' Estrada
