My 3-year-old student who is non-verbal had no interest in any literacy materials when she arrived in preschool due to ocular and cortical visual impairments. Her preschool provided rich experience based literacy using adapted books matched to her ocular visual needs and matched to her CVI Range Assessment (Roman-Lantzy 2007). Each book had an accompanying storybox with 3D materials to support each non-complex picture.
I wanted to check visual recognition of one 2D image. I choose the book Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! I’m Off to the Moon by Dan Yaccarino. It had a series of images of round pictures. As a salient feature (Roman-Lantzy) I used a shiny, gold, round sticker. I presented this sticker on a white non-complex background. I knew my student loves the Itsy, Bitsy song. With hand under hand support, each time the sticker was presented we would touch the sticker together and I sang part of her favorite song.
With her success with pointing to this one sticker, I applied the sticker in different places on each page of the Zoom! book.
After a week, she was looking at the pages and finding the shiny sticker each time. She would lean closer to reduce the complexity, isolate her index finger, point and look at me and smile. True recognition! With the increasing interest, she really studies all the classroom adapted books and even chooses books during her free time on the mat.
This was reprinted with the author’s permission from the CVI Teacher blog.
