Visually Impaired Teacher Resources
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Every student needs to have access to classroom instruction, no matter what circumstances or disabilities keep them from participating in a standard method. Whether you’re teaching at a school for visually impaired students or making accommodations for learners with visual impairments, Lesson Planet has a wealth of resources to bring your teaching to the learners who need it.
Elementary classes can use a counting activity for students with visual impairment to reinforce math instruction, or a project on series circuits to make STEM concepts accessible. For teachers who have never taught visually impaired students, a helpful guide is a great start, as well as a video with tips for mainstream accommodations.
Reinforce compassion and friendship support for students without disabilities, as well. A lesson based on Rita Whitman Steingold’s Taking Visual Impairment to School emphasizes empathy for those with visual disabilities, while a photo essay and accompanying assignments enables sighted learners to experience life as their visually impaired peers do.
At Lesson Planet, we know that each pupil in your class is special and unique, and that some require more accommodations than others to access instructional material. Our teacher-approved resources make it easier than ever to get your exemplary teaching into as many hands—and minds—as possible.
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Museum of Disability
Taking Visual Impairment to School
What is the world like when you can't see, or when your vision is impaired? Learn about how Lisa communicates with the world around her with Taking Visual Impairment to School by Rita Whitman Steingold. Learners answer...
Curated OER
Making a desk organizer for students who are blind or visually impaired
Organization is of the utmost importance when teaching orientation and mobility to learners with visual impairments. To help keep everything in order and provide independence, use these instructions for making a desk organizer. The...
Perkins School for the Blind
Encouraging Students Who are Blind or Visually Impaired to Express Their Feelings and Explore Imagination
Being expressive in a creative, empathetic, or imaginative way is not only fun, it builds good pre-writing and communication skills. Learners with visual impairments have a roundtable discussion session where several sentence frames...
Curated OER
Disability in the Media Lesson Plan: Braille
Students determine the workings of the Braille alphabet and how people with visual impairments learn how to use it. In this Braille lesson, students study the associated vocabulary, read about Helen Keller, and complete associated...
Curated OER
Visual Impairment Based on a Children's Book
Students explore practical information about visual impairment. They explore about the uses of seeing eye cane. Students explore the postive aspects about how people fucntion in spite of handicaps. They explore about helping others.
Museum of Disability
A Picture Book of Louis Braille
Teach kids about the beginnings of the Braille writing system with a lesson about Louis Braille. A series of discussion questions guide young readers though A Picture Book of Louis Braille by David A. Adler, and once they finish the...
Film English
Theo’s Story
Encourage your class to consider a beautiful short film about a boy named Theo who happens to be visually impaired. Over the course of the lesson, pupils work in pairs, discuss their ideas and the film as a class, view the film,...
Perkins School for the Blind
Conductors of Heat - Hot Spoons
Why is the end of a spoon hot when it's not all the way in the hot water? A great question deserves a great answer, and learners with visual impairments will use their auditory and tactile senses to get that answer. A talking...
Perkins School for the Blind
Timeline for Anne
It is key to the learning process to make everything a child with visual impairments does as tactile as possible. After reading Anne of Green Gables, the class discusses her life events in order to make a tactile time line. They...
Perkins School for the Blind
Creating a 3-D Model of a Plant Life
Instructing blind or visually impaired learners means you need to make symbolic tactile representations of various processes to provide as much input as possible. But wouldn't it be even better to have your learners make the models...
Perkins School for the Blind
Beginning Map Skills
Maps can be so much fun, they help you understand spatial relationships, distance between objects, and can foster direction skills. Budding cartographers with visual impairments use the Wheatley Tactile Diagramming Kit to create their...
Perkins School for the Blind
Making Choices
Here is an excellent and well-developed lesson intended to promote choice-making skills for learners with visual impairment and intellectual disabilities. It fosters choice-making skills through a soft version of discrete trial training,...
TED-Ed
How Braille Was Invented
As part of its Moment of Vision series, TEDEd provides a brief video that explains how the braille language system was first developed to send coded messages during wartime.
Perkins School for the Blind
Kitchen Clean-up
If you make a meal, you must clean up the mess. Foster a sense of independence while having learners practice a skill they can use in the workplace. Teens with visual impairments practice cleaning, organizing, stacking, and sorting a...
Perkins School for the Blind
Baseball
Baseball is an American pastime, super fun to play, and can be made accessible to learners with visual impairments. Instead of taking to the ball field, your class can learn the rules of the game by playing a small three-dimensional...
Perkins School for the Blind
Building a Basic Series Circuit
Make science a fully accessible subject for your learners with visual impairments. They'll use tactile models to explore the nature of basic electrical circuits. Template board, wires, batteries, and Velcro are used to construct the...
Perkins School for the Blind
Taking Turns
For small children or learners with disabilities, learning to wait patiently and taking turns is very important. In pairs, two children with visual impairments take turns asking for, waiting for, and playing with a musical...
Perkins School for the Blind
Teach Personal Possession and Pronouns with Simple Objects
The concept of what is mine and what is yours seems simple, but for children with visual impairments, it is a concept that must be taught. Each child in the class puts one of their shoes in a single box, they take turns choosing a shoe,...
Perkins School for the Blind
Coin Identification
You got some money, and you're not afraid to use it. Before you can use that money, you need to know what it's worth. Included is a set of activity instructions that will help your visually impaired learners indentify coins. Pupils...
Perkins School for the Blind
Stuff, Seal and Stamp Mail
Have your class practice functional skills that can be applied to a wide variety of job opportunities. They will use a folding jig to help them fold, stuff, seal, stamp, and mail letters. Students with visual impairments will build...
Perkins School for the Blind
What Would You Do If...?
What would you do if...? That's a great question, and, when posed to learners with visual impairments, a question that can foster concept development and speaking and problem-solving skills that relate to real-life situations. The...
Perkins School for the Blind
Counting Book
Here is a wonderful way to teach children with visual impairments how to count and build number recognition skills. Included, you will find a set of instructions on how to create a counting book from card stock, jump rings, and cotton...
Perkins School for the Blind
Left Versus Right
When you can't see, it is extremely important to be able to reorient yourself. Learners with visual impairments work though an activity to build spacial awareness based on moving left and right. A marker (bracelet, bell, or weight) is...
Perkins School for the Blind
Daily Journal
Keeping a daily journal is fun. It builds strong writing skills and provides an expressive outlet. For children with visual impairments, it's even more important. It provides a way for them to connect written word with real events,...
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