World Braille Day is on January 4th, but the OISE Library wants to recognize a few great titles a little early this year in our lobby display! Our lobby display is designed to provide the OISE community with some great works that can be incorporated into the classroom, focusing on guides for teachers to aid students with a visual impairment, children’s literature with braille texts, and works that encourage learning through talk.
Teaching Guides
To begin, let’s talk about ECC Essentials: Teaching the Expanded Core Curriculum to Students with Visual Impairments. This is an expansive work by Carol B. Allman and Sandra Lewis goes into great detail on how to effectively expand the curriculum to enrich the learning of visually impaired students in your class, discussing topics such as sensory efficiency, assistive technology, independent living, recreation and leisure,and career education. This work recognizes that each student with a visual impairment is unique and no text would be able to provide a comprehensive guide that would apply to every student, but its goal is to dive into a detail presentation of supportive teaching techniques that can work as a starting off point when helping students with a visual impairment in your class.
Learning Through Talk: Developing Learning Dialogues in the Primary Classroom, by Heather Luxford and Lizzie Smart is a practical handbook, designed to help your primary students learn how to have comprehensive conversations to become independent thinkers, while improving their communication skills. This work is a guide to prompt communication, participation, collaboration, positive communication, and reflection. This work was not specifically designed for students with visual impairments, but it could be a unique method to have students come together to learn through discussion.
Every student should be able to reach for the stars, College Success For Students With Disabilities: A Guide to finding and Using Resources, with Real-World Stories, acts as a guide to students with disabilities and provides suggestions and advice on how students with a disability can succeed, and overviews the support they might need to achieve their dreams. Chapter 12 focuses on students who are blind or have a visual impairment, and includes the real-world story of John, a man with a visual impairment who describes how he began his educational journey as a mature student at a community college, and the help he received to eventually transfer to a four-year state school to pursue his education. At the end of the chapter John provides his own personal advice to visually impaired students. The chapter goes into further depth on choosing a college that is accommodating to a visually impaired student, the possible accommodations a student may request, such as, enlarged font or braille, use of a computer, service animals, scribes, and extended test times.
Children’s Books
There are also several children’s literature featured in this display, the majority containing both braille and print text. Meet Frederick, the poet mouse! Frederick loves summer, but when the winter comes he keeps all of his friends warm with his poetry. A Picture Book of Louis Braille, introduce your class to the man who invented Braille and his personal journey. Homophones can be confusing for any student, but especially so for a student with a visually impairment. Dear, Deer is a fun book that uses various homophones in unique silly sentences to provide various context to potentially confusing words. In addition to these wonderful works, Expectations, A Gift for Blind Children From Braille Institute, is an anthology of children’s literature. This anthology includes stories from several well known authors including, Roald Dahl, Amanda Hall, and Jack Prelutsky. This work is designed specifically for Braille students, it does not have print text to read along with braille.
Activity Kits
To encourage educational play, the OISE Library also has a copy of the Deluxe Edition of Scrabble with Braille and print lettering! Both visually able students and those with a visual impairment will be able to play alongside each other in this classic game.
Everything on display can be checked out! Stop by the OISE Library Service Desk and we’ll retrieve an item from the display case for you.
