31
VIDBE-Q Volume 64 Issue 2
during instruction. We wanted to find a way to address their complex
educational needs. Specifically, we were interested in improving
engagement during our whole group reading instruction and making the
school day more meaningful for these students.
Kelly Brown, our TVI, helped identify appropriate literacy and
functional learning material needs for our students with Cortical Vision
Impairment (CVI) by pointing us to the Learning Media Assessment portion
of the Functional Vision and Learning Media Assessment that reflected
"real objects". We learned that there is a process for moving students from
real objects, to partial real objects, to CVI friendly photos of the real
objects, to line drawings, to commercially produced picture systems (i.e.
Boardmaker). This is the Continuum of Symbol Systems. We first looked
how to address our students' daily needs and where they fell on this
Continuum of Symbol System, to determine materials and then created
them together as a team.
For example, we determined some activities students participated in
every day, including using the restroom, eating lunch, and working on her
IEP goals. We developed specific partial symbols representing these
activities. For restroom, we cut off part of the changing pad so she was
able to anticipate the activity of going to the restroom and being changed.
