Math & Visually Impaired Students

This question comes from Patrick Rodenborn, a member of the Adult Numeracy Network. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Greetings,

I just found out that one of my upcoming math students is blind/visually impaired (I haven't met him yet and do not know how he would describe himself) and I am looking for any ideas or advice for supporting him. Much of my instruction is visual, because math is visual. I don't want to offer him anything less than what I offer my other students, so any advice you have for translating the work done with graphs, visual patterns, and geometry into forms that my student can get the most benefit from would be appreciated.

We've started collecting manipulatives and have some funding to buy more, so suggestions there would be great as well.

Thanks in advance for any help you wonderful people can offer!

 

 

Comments

Hi all, 
I hope you find this webinar useful as the presenter shares information and strategies for applying universal design and teaching strategies related to math for visually impaired learners. 

There's also a free PDF from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics about teaching mathematics to visually impaired learners. While this is limited to one subject area, I believe you can grab some ideas and strategies that are applicable to all of math. 

Good luck!

Kathy Tracey

While watching the webinar Kathy shared, I had to pause and capture a few images that really resonated with me. I've seen geoboards used in math class, but the way this was used in the video was so much more than what I've seen before. When I saw these images that incorporated the rubber bands AND a thin piece of flexible plastic to create various mathematical concepts, I was blown away. The circle around a triangle is brilliant, and what a great way to do bar graphs, too!  (The "Play" button in the second image is part of the screenshot from the webinar. I couldn't grab the image without that being in the frame.)

          
 

The webinar had so many resource ideas to Google. Here are a couple of places you might look, Patrick, for ready-to-use lessons or adaptive resources:

 Heidi