Developing Language and Literacy Skills: Outcomes and Best Practices for Preschool and Elementary School Children with CVI and Complex Communication Needs
This post is adapted with permission from the authors Aileen Arai, MA, Director of Education, The Bridge School and Sarah W. Blackstone, PhD, CCC-SLP, PI, CVI/AAC Project, The Bridge School, from a presentation at the Getting in Touch with Literacy conference in Seattle, November 2019.
Guiding Principles
- No child (with CVI and CCN) should be denied access to seeing, learning, language, literacy, communication and full participation.
- Vision, learning, mobility, language, literacy, communication, participation are developmentally intertwined.
- If you can’t talk and have CVI, incidental learning and joint attention are limited. When vision improves, other areas can be positively impacted.
- Improvement in functional vision and other developmental domains should be expected.
- Vision, language, learning and communication goals should be integrated and addressed holistically and collaboratively by teams that include SLPs, vision specialists, teachers, OTs, PTs, physicians, family members, and others as needed.
- The quality and quantity of nonverbal and linguistic input to children with CVI helps them process visual information, as well as understand and interpret what they see and experience.
- Access to language and sufficiently large vocabularies is essential to a child’s long-term linguistic, cognitive, educational, social, emotional, and communication development and their participation and ability to function in the world.
- Children with CVI and CCN need access to assistive technologies and a variety of AAC tools and strategies, across their life span.
- Vision, language, literacy, learning, communication and participation goals must be considered concurrently, however, they are NOT always addressed simultaneously.
Adapted from Blackstone, S. & Roman-Lantzy, C. (2019). Children with CVI and Complex Communication Needs. In C. Roman-Lantzy (ed.), Cortical Visual Impairment: Advanced Principles. 58-91: Louisville, KY: APH Press.
CVI Resources for Adapting Literacy Activities
Pediatric Cortical Visual Impairment Society
Little Bear Sees
MontessoriumReferences
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