Developing Social Skills in Children Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired with Sharon Sacks

Perkins latest webcast, "Developing Social Skills in Children who are Blind or Visually Impaired" with Sharon Sacks provides an overview of the importance of including social skills instruction when teaching children who are blind or visually impaired. Sharon talks about the natural development of social skills in the sighted population and the challenges of learning these skills for children who are blind or visually impaired.
The chapters in this webcast are: 1 - Introduction; 2 - Parent and Child: The First Social Interaction, 3 - Widening the Social Circles, 4 - Learning Social Skills in the Classroom, 5 - Developing an Appropriate Self-Awareness, 6 - Self-Advocacy as a Social Skill, 7 - Social Skills and Satisfaction.
Special educators can earn professional credits for watching this video. Learn more at www.perkins.org/tutorials/

[@marleys3599]

The video mentions blind/VI kids with other disabilities a lot. Is it common for blind/VI kids with no other disabilities to have difficulties with social skills or is this seen only in multiply disabled blind/VI kids?

[@addiprice7976]

I agree

[@JosephSeabourne]

It is still common for people with only blindness to still have social skill problems.

[@lyonssight]

A lot of social learning, reading social cues, is incidental learning. For example, many blind students are falsely diagnosed as autistic because of their behaviors (known as "blindisms") however, this is literally due to being blind. I have a grammar-school student who is legally-blind and low vision 20/300 (legal blindness is at 20/200) and his teacher recommended him for an ADD testing/diagnosis. This is because he would snap his head to look around the classroom to identify the source of noise. He field of vision is limited so he cannot turn his eyes to see, he literally has to turn his head and use his central vision to see something. Since he's in a noisy classroom, he's always looking around, even when the teacher is talking. For this reason the teacher though "oh this kid must have ADD or something" and it's totally off the mark. While it's possible for a blind or low vision student to have ADD or Autism-or any other cognitive impairment or learning deficit-it is far more likely that the behavior they are manifesting is a result of their blindness or low vision. This is why the ECC (Expanded Core Curriculum) is so important, because it includes justification for social skills as well as other supplementary "soft skills" to ensure B/VI students have the support they need to learn, grow and adapt into successful adults.

[@hollyridgley734]

I wish blind school and federations organizations for the blind would stop acting as if learning braill or knowing about braille is a big secret not supposed to know about it unless you are blind visually impaired or deaf blind. You can find a lot of information about how great it is to learn braille and how wonderful and helpful it is. But it is very difficult to learn braille because one you have to pay for very expensive classes unless you’re a very young child or two we simply cannot find any information for classes for adults to learn braille. Why is it if you are cited you can find classes galore that you can take for free or minimum price. But if you are visually impaired or blind you can’t. I get that learning braill is not a popular thing because not everybody needs it. But if it’s cited child God-given right to learn to read for free why can’t my child learn for free.