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Lorem Ipsum Dolor Spring 2016
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Education. It was my goal to really pinpoint which skills involved vision. This
allowed me to see where accommodations and adaptations are needed for
students who are blind or visually impaired. After this, I began to look at a
Pennsylvanian elementary school science curriculum. This is where I saw a
huge problem in accommodations. The expectations and activities in no way
accommodated students with visual impairments. I began to adapt the
curriculum activities so that students with visual impairments could complete
them. For example, a first grade objective is to identify and describe types of
fresh and salt-water and the suggested activity is to classify pictures of bodies
of water, e.g., fresh and salt. My initial adaptation was to have the student
classify tactile images of the different bodies of water. As I continued
adapting these activities, I began to realize that there are so many activities
that need adaption, because of the visual skills they require.
As my research continues and I begin to work in the field of visual
impairments, I hope to compile numerous resources that could be used by
any teacher of the visually impaired. This will include resources for
adaptation, instructions to create materials, and ideas about how to teach a
certain topic. I feel that my research, among other research in the STEM
area, is just the beginning of finding the best methods of adapting science for
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