As part of the Functional Vision Assessment, the Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments should assess the student's visual skills. These skills should be assessed after the assessment of the student's ocular skills, visual acuity and visual fields.
Visual Perception:
Assess the student's perceptual behaviors including depth perception, visual closure, visual discrimination, visual association, visual memory, visual sequencing, figure-ground discrimination, and spatial relationships. Observe spatial orientation including position of objects for viewing, ability to sequence objects and pictures, and ability to organize materials.
Depth Perception:
Observe how a student reaches for materials, grasps them, transports them, places them, releases them and imitates the movements) Observe the students depth perception and note if there is any overreaching, under reaching, figure-ground discrimination. Assess if the student uses eye-hand coordination to place puzzle pieces in inset puzzle or place objects where they belong. Also observe the student's travel abilities both indoors and outdoors.
Visual Discrimination
Assess the student's abilities to visually search for and identify of objects, colors, and pictures. Observe the students reaction to the disappearance of objects, reaction to differences in objects, recognition of familiar objects, people, and pictures, and ability to discriminate colors. Observe how a student responds to gestures, details and demonstrations. Observe the student's ability to identify common objects, coins and pictures. Assess student's ability to match objects, colors, and pictures. Assess the students ability to locate landmarks and adapt to lighting changes.
Social Discrimination
Assess if the student orients toward faces or regards faces. Note if the student watches the speaker's eyes and mouth. Observe if the student will establish eye contact or respond with a smile when socially approached. Does the student recognize the caregiver or other familiar adults?
Color Vision
Simply asking a student to identify colors by name is not sufficient to determine his ability to distinguish among colors and shades. You may want to organize a set of cards that include lighter and darker shades of the same hue and ask the student to arrange them from lighter to darker shades or in families of related hues. It is also important to evaluate a student's ability to identify colors in real situations.
For students who are able to identify shapes, I like to use the Color Vision Testing Made Easy by Terrance Waggoner.
Observe whether a student can select an item by color or distinguish between associated colors in following directions in a primary workbook or reading graphs and pie charts in a textbook. For younger students, since many classroom activities depend on the ability to identify color, it is important to notify the classroom teacher, as well as the student, of any differences in color recognition, so tasks that are color dependent can be modified, such as working with a lab partner with normal color vision in chemistry experiments.
While the ability to match a set of colored objects may suggest intact color perception, a variety of different hues or saturation of the same color should be used to assess color vision. For this reason, several different sets of toys and materials should be used. Initially, ask the student to match highly contrasting colors to ensure that the student understands the task and has success between: red/green; red/brown; green/orange; blue/green; blue/yellow; green/yellow; and brown/orange/purple.
Accurate perception of color is important as many activities are oriented toward learning colors and using colors in coloring, drawing, labeling. Often reading materials are color oriented and accompanying workbook activities require accurate color perception. Color is often used to provide emphasis or to clarify instructions. Strategies/Possible Suggestions:
Use black marker to make bold lines around area to be colored.
Adapt maps with symbols
Label crayons (may need to use large/bold font)
Adapt any assignments requiring color coding
Teach the student color concepts (ex. the sky is blue, bananas are yellow, etc.)
Handwriting
A student's handwriting abilities should also be assessed in the functional vision assessment. Handwriting can be particularly difficult for students with low vision because it requires hand-eye coordination in a sometimes uncomfortable working posture. Some students can write legibly but have difficulty reading their own handwriting; therefore, students should be asked to read material that they have written, especially material that has been written several days before and is no longer familiar. Tasks such as writing a letter to a friend, making a grocery list, or entering homework assignments on a daily schedule will reflect a student's handwriting skills. Students should be encouraged to select their own handwriting tools and paper, and the teacher should explore the efficiency of these and other options.
Use of Technology
Discuss the technology used by the student. What are the student's skills with keyboarding? What other types of technology does the student use? Include the student's ability to use other forms of technology, word processing, social networking and cell phones.
Strategies & Tips for Conducting a FVELMA Presentation
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TVI's Guide to Teaching the ECC: An Activities Based Curriculum for Teaching Students who are Blind or Visually Impaired
$50.00
Written specifically for fellow itinerant Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments (TVI’s), this book consists of over 400 activities and topic areas of discussion for instructing students in the Expanded Core Curriculum. The activities are age-neutral and multi-sensory and therefore can meet the needs of the broad range of students served on an itinerant caseload serving. The activities can be individualized to the students various learning modalities and scaffold in order to challenge students but ensure success. Select those activities that align with the student’s learning objects based on the student’s unique visual needs and academic and developmental level.
The core activities listed in the Activity section can be adapted to each thematic unit. These include:
Object Characteristic Activities
Quantity & Number Concepts
Time Concept Activities
Environment & Job Awareness Activities
Listening Skills Activities
Reading Foundation Activities
Reading Fluency Activities
Braille Basics Activities
Writing Activities
Tactual Efficiency Activities
Developing Skillful Hands Activities
Visual Efficiency Activities
Optical Device Instruction Activities
Recipe Activities
In addition to the core activity areas, each of the 32 Thematic Units incorporates additional unique ECC concepts and skills providing you with a years’ worth of activities. These units are cyclical and can be used repeatedly to help students build on prior knowledge and develop a deeper understanding of concepts. Each unit includes suggestions for activity adaptation associated with the unit. These include lists of objects, possible community based experiences, environmental print, poems, children & young reader books, children's songs, pop culture songs, movies, and websites.
Unique Concepts within the Units include:
Self Advocacy Activities (e.g. advocating for safe classroom, presenting to class on visual impairment, requesting help and more)
Social Skills Activities (e.g. Being bullied or teased, giving and receiving compliments, body language, "I" messages when upset and more)
Recreation & Leisure Activities (e.g. exploring interest areas, getting involved in clubs and sports, playing games, and more)
O&M Support Activities (e.g. Suggestions for community based experiences, dog guide information, locations in the school, bioptics, ride sharing, traffic signs, and more)
Independent Living Skill Activities (e.g. chores, being responsible, using tools, recipe suggestions, hygiene, staying healthy, labeling foods and products, and more)
Sensory Efficiency Activities (e.g. unique sensory experiences related to the unit, unique optical device activities, and more)
Compensatory Activities (e.g. organizing materials, study habits, and many unique concepts related to the unit)
Career & Vocational Activities (e.g. job awareness, completing applications, job task suggestions, and more)
Although the intended audience of this resource is fellow Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments, special education teachers may find these activities beneficial to the students in their classrooms as the activities are multisensory and include life skills and concepts needed by all students. This resource, however, is not intended to take the place of a Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments (TVI). Readers are advised to consult their own TVI’s regarding instruction in the ECC and the unique visual needs of the student’s served in their programs.
Note: This curriculum is a digital pdf download. Once you make your purchase you will be directed to an order confirmation page where you will find the download link. This download will also be included on the receipt sent to the email address you provide. The pdf download can be found directly under the order number.
Each download is intended for single instructor use per copyright. Thank you for helping me preserve the content and not distributing copies to third parties.
Product details
Digital pdf download: 364 pages (11 pt font)
Publisher: Teaching Students with Visual Impairments
Visual Efficiency & Magnifier Fluency Grab & Go ECC Supplements
$20.00
This workbook is a pdf download that can be printed on demand for use with students. It contains five different types of worksheets for developing visual motor skills and near magnifier fluency skills particularly with the use of a video magnifier. As a supplement to the TVI’s Guide to the ECC, the worksheets correspond to each of the 32 ECC Thematic units. The worksheets, along with a list of environmental print for each thematic unit, are designed to help students refine their visual motor skills while reinforcing ECC concepts presented in the thematic units.
Visual Efficiency & Near Magnifier Fluency Worksheet Details:
Digital pdf download: 210 pages
Publisher: Teaching Students with Visual Impairments
