Supporting Life Skills for Young Children with Vision Impairment and Other Disabilities

This practical resource is designed to help professionals, parents and carers as they support children with vision impairments to develop independence in everyday tasks. Using the Early Years Foundation Stage framework as a basis, it provides a wealth of strategies and activities to develop key skills, including dressing, maintaining personal hygiene, eating and drinking and road safety. This is an invaluable tool that can be dipped in and out of to help make learning fun, boosting the child's confi dence and helping create a positive 'can- do' attitude when faced with new challenges. This book: - Addresses the main problem areas for babies and young visually impaired children and their families, by providing simple explanations of skills and offering strategies and techniques to support progression onto the next stage. - Is written in a fully accessible style, with photocopiable pages and additional downloadable resources. - Provides a variety of documentation to chart the child's development and show progress over time. Research shows strong indicators that early intervention can reduce or eliminate developmental delays in children with a vision impairment. The supporting strategies in this book help busy professionals and carers to make every opportunity a learning opportunity, allowing children with a vision impairment to become confi dent and independent individuals.

Fiona Broadley has worked for the last 30 years, exclusively teaching mobility and independent living skills to children and young people with vision impairments, many of whom have additional needs. As the Chair of Habilitation VIUK (formerly MISE), she assisted in the gathering of research for the Mobility21 Project, which ultimately led to the creation of the National Quality Standards for the delivery of habilitation training and the creation of the new profession of habilitation specialist. She heads a team of registered qualifi ed habilitation specialists, all of whom have contributed to the ideas and practice found within this book. She now also lectures to student habilitation specialists at Birmingham City University, and with her team delivers the habilitation elements of the training for specialist teachers of the visually impaired at the University of Birmingham. She lives in (not so) rural Warwickshire with her family and the school buddy dog, Griff.

Common Terms Introduction Habilitation Skills: Foundation Early Years Foundation Curriculum Section: 1.00-2.00 Dressing, Undressing & fastenings 3.00 Personal Hygiene -toileting, hand washing 4.00 Feeding Eating and drinking 5.00 Movement 6.00 Concept development 7.00 Listening and Looking 8.00 Road safety 9.00 Personal safety 10.00 Starting school or nursery Appendices Glossary References