[blindkid] social skills

[Penny Duffy]

Zunaira,

I think its very common for blind and visually impaired children to have
issues socializing with peers.  My daughter became blind last year.
Sometime before she ended kindergarten and she is in second grade right
now.   Its been an adjustment for my daughter socially.  She has always
been a very social and kind child.  One issue she has is finding her
friends during recess.  How we handled this was we gave her ideas and we
had her come up with her own solution.  She will try and pre-plan who she
will play with during recess and set up a spot to meet the friend she is
playing with.  Her friends are well 'trained' They still say who they are
when they come up to her even though she knows who it is most of the time
by voice.  Abby  has some of her peripheral  vision but in a crowd of
people she can't pick anyone out. She has a very understanding group of
friends that have learned that she can't find them on the playground.

She has a very hard time with those temporarily friendship situations.
 Like meeting someone new at a park you may never meet again or going to
camp for a week.       She miss all visual clues like smiles and waves.  It
takes her longer.

Does the school facilitate social interaction with her peers?  Like
breaking them down into pairs?  It may help her if you arranged 1 on 1
playdates with peers.  There is so much going on that sometimes large
group situations can be overwhelming. Little bites and take it slow. My son
is not blind but he has struggled life long with speech issues.   He has
always bonded more with adults. He has slowly started to make friends with
peers. I realized that it was the adults that had more patience deal with
is difficultly talking.

There is no quick and easy answers. Its hard to see your
child struggling socially. I will say i know a lot of blind children who
are true social butterflies.

-
--Penny
----------
A lucky mother to two amazing children - visionfora.blogspot.com


On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 9:55 PM, Zunaira T. Wasif <zwasif at fau.edu> wrote:

> Do any of your visually impaired children have trouble socializing?  I
> have a four year old in pre-school who has miner difficulties with
> inniciating conversations and so forth with other children in her class.
>  Do you know of any interventions for the mainstream class room setting
> that work?
> Thanks
> Zunaira
>
> _______________________________________________
> blindkid mailing list
> blindkid at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindkid_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> blindkid:
>
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindkid_nfbnet.org/pennyduffy%40gmail.com
>



-- 
--Penny
----------
A lucky mother to two amazing children - visionfora.blogspot.com