Tactile books for visually impaired pre-readers

I am bursting with pride right now. My friend Lynette Rudman (who has been featured once before in this blog) has been honoured in an international competition for her tactile books.

Some years ago, a blind child enrolled at Lynette's nursery school. Lynette quickly discovered that were no picture books aimed at such a child. Until a blind child learned braille, they were restricted to a vicarious enjoyment of books. She decided to fix this, and set about creating a series of tactile books called 'I read with my hands'.

The books are handmade by Lynette and her faithful team.

On impulse, Lynette entered one her books into the 2009 Typhlo and Tactus competition... and won!

If you work with any visually impaired littlies or have visually impaired children of your own, you might be interested in Lynette's books.

Well done, Zinky. Proud of you, girl!

On being shallow

I learnt something about myself this week. I am more shallow than I would like.

On two occasions this week, I attended meetings at sexual health clinics. When I reported to the front desk, I felt the need to make it clear that I was there in a professional capacity and not as a patient.

I was disappointed in myself. Several people have responded with variations on the theme of "Eew!" when I have mentioned my current project. I have no such reaction. I consider sexual health to be a subject of critical importance. Since the material I am working on is of a clinical nature aimed at specialising clinicians, I realise that I am going to see and include in the learning materials some rather gruesome images. I have no qualms about that. Our doctors need to know as much as possible about these matters and they will see far worse things in the course of their careers. Somebody needs to put the learning materials together. It might as well be me.

I was reminded of a group of people I once encountered. All wore matching T-shirts and name badges. They were obviously on some sort of outing. Some of them gave outward signs of some form of mental disorder, others were indentifiable as having Down Syndrome. Among the group, there were also some with no discernable impairment/special need. But of course, not all mental disorders manifest by means of any outward signs, so it was likely that some of those who seemed unimpaired had special needs, too. Some, however, had to be staff.

Such is the graciousness of these people that they felt no need to distance themselves from their charges in any outward way. They felt no need to wear anything that identified them as carers rather than patients. I was deeply impressed by this at the time.

My experience this week tells me I am far more superficial than they.

Mea culpa.

Tactile graphics

Yesterday an old school friend contacted me via Facebook, since which time the usual "what have you been doing" messages have been rattling back and forth.

I'm so impressed with what she's been doing, I thought I'd give her a mention here today.

Lynette runs her own preschool. A few years ago, a three year old blind girl enrolled at her school. Lynette noticed how this little girl used to love to pretend to be able to read the books in the reading corner, asking the sighted children to explain to her what was on the page. Lynette decided to track down some materials that the little girl could appreciate for herself and came up empty, so she decided to set the matter to rights.

She started making tactile books for children aged 3-7, and is now supplying an international market. Books are currently available in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa - the three main languages spoken in the area of South Africa where Lynette is based, but they are fully customisable. For example, Lynette offers to leave a space below each picture so that a parent/teacher can add text or braille in the child's mother tongue. Of course, since each book is individually handmade, they take some time to produce, and she understandably has a two month backlog at present. It seems to me like she could do with a few extra pairs of hands!

There are educational books about colours, numbers and such; a series of storybooks; a handful of nature storybooks; cloth books for the really little ones and several educational games. She has also developed a set of manuals for parents and teachers.

To be brutally honest - the navigation on her website could be more intuitive, but you're more than savvy enough to cope with that!

Assessing special needs: isn't there a better way?

This is the threatened follow up to yesterday's post, but this one is more directly related to learning, you will be pleased to discover.

Once again, this is not hypothetical.

Once upon a time, there was a baby girl who, at the age of 10 months, was still not able to sit up on her own. Her parents were referred to specialists in Cape Town, where she was assessed for cerebral palsy. The tests came back negative, and it was decided that she was simply atonic (which certainly seems to be the case - today she is somewhat clumsy and inelegant, but not attention-grabbingly so). While she was undergoing tests, she developed an ear infection - something to which she was prone. Later evaluations would indicate that it was likely that the medication she was given for this infection caused her to go deaf, since (a) it was contra-indicated for a child with grommets and (b) she had responded normally to sound stimuli before that time.

The audiologist duly assigned to her case was adamant that she should not be taught sign language. He argued that her poor co-ordination was inadequate to the task and, furthermore, that this avenue would restrict her communication to only those who knew sign language. Since there was no school which taught the approach known as "total communication" in her home town, the child was packed off to boarding school at a specialist school for the deaf 1100kms/700 miles away at the age of 4. This experience was traumatic for the entire family, and she did not progress at all well. After all, what child can learn effectively if she is miserable? Her communication skills did not improve a great deal, so instead of being cut off from hearing people, she was cut off from everyone.

At the age of 7, she was given a cochlear implant. The school felt that this move put her outside of the closely defined demographic they chose to address. She was duly sent back home. Sadly, having spent her formative years in a silent world, she decided that sound was a dreadful thing, and very quickly learnt to turn off the receiver. This meant that the reality of her situation was no different than before, but her eligibility for specialist schools had changed because of the mere presence of the implant - none of the schools were qualified to deal with a situation such as hers, and she was shunted from pillar to post.

It was in selecting a school for her to attend at this stage that her parents found themselves dealing with the inadequacies of tests designed to assess a child's mental capacity and potential. None of the assessments available could be applied. Because of her poor reading age, it was decided that she was very probably dyslexic (I have since learnt that deaf people often have poor reading skills). It was further decided that she had learning difficulties of indeterminate nature. Helpful. She was placed in a specialist school for children lacking in the intellectual capacity to cope with the rigours of the standard curriculum.

Having now left school, she is not qualified to do anything very much and runs the risk of losing her (pitiful) disablity grant, should she ever land a job. Of course, it's too late to change things, but I have often wondered what might have been done.

One thing I noticed, when watching her at play with other deaf children (disclosure: this girl is my niece) is that deaf kids are rough... I mean really physical. For those who work with them routinely, this is par for the course, but imagine a teacher trying to deal with this level of roughness in a mainstream school, where hearing children are not likely to put up with being pushed and pulled, hugged and thumped. Also, when a small deaf child wants something, she takes it. She is not intuned to the idea of manners or asking for something - nor do the wails of dismay from the "victim" alert her to the fact that she has caused any unhappiness. I can't see any mainstream teacher being able to handle this, while trying to teach the curriculum to all 30 children in the class.

Will we ever know what her true potential is? She never acquired the literacy skills to complete a written assessment of her mental capacity, and she doesn't possess the communication skills to complete the verbal tests that are sometimes used as an alternative. How might she have been tested to see if she is, in fact, as intellectually handicapped as has been assumed?

I was very glad when the misery of boarding school was brought to an end, even though this threw her future education into a limbo from which it never recovered. During the time she was a boarder, she used to come to my home for a weekend every month, where it became apparent that the little things that parents do for their small children as a matter of course (I'll spare you the details) were simply going undone, and she spent the entire weekend sitting listlessly on the couch with tears rolling down her face - unable to tell me why she was so unhappy. Sadly, I think that she assumed she was being taken home whenever I came to collect her, which might have had something to do with it.

I apologise for the heartrending sadness of this story, but I wonder if you can suggest what might have been done differently.