Anyway, this morning we continued our journey into better understanding Victor's world. I was excited when one child sat down and said, "I'm excited to find out what we're going to do today!" We started by talking about the word VALUE and placing value on people, all people. I shared a post from one of my favorite blogs, a post where the mother of several children with special needs shares how God taught her the value of all life.
We then broke into two groups to practice using our senses to discern what's around us. Half of us tried to identify the scent on a cotton ball (soy sauce, coconut extract, almond extract, vanilla, and lemon). The other half played Memory with Victor's textured bean bags. Remember all that fabric that people gave me to make Victor's Quilt of Many Textures? His vision therapist had the great idea to use the remaining fabric to make bean bags, two of each, so that Victor can use them to play a Memory type game. That's exactly what we did. Isaac discovered that depending on the fabric, the beans inside made different sounds and he relied on that sense more than his sense of touch. He got them all correct!
Our next part of the lesson was on Braille and we started with a movie about Louis Braille and how at age 16 he invented the reading and writing system still used today, in many languages, all over the world. We were fascinated by the simplicity of the code, yet struggled with the degree of difficulty in actually reading and writing with it. Each child put the letters of their name in order (last week we outlined the letters with puffy paint), then practiced forming the letters by using tennis balls and baseballs in muffin tins and finally they wrote their names on paper using the Braille chart.
A few months ago, we studied bats together so it was great to find this video of a blind teenager who uses echolocation to successfully maneuver with the use of a cane or by holding his arms out to make his way. Amazing!
Tune in next week for Part 3 of Understanding.
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