Morning Meeting Ideas for Children with Limited Visual Attention

The first place to start in developing a morning meeting routine, of course, is to assess each child to determine their visual needs. Understanding the child’s functional visual skills allows you to create goals and objectives and to provide across-the-day accommodations and methodologies to meet those needs.

• Materials in morning meeting must have considerations for color. Best colors are often bright and saturated. Single colored items are most accessible. Your presentations must consider that the child is only seeing color, not shape to discriminate one thing for another. If you have all red things, they can’t do this discrimination. Because this child is very visually impaired, compensatory skills should also be considered.
• Items presented must be 3D, real, familiar and functional objects NOT PICTURES! 3D objects will provide visual access, tactile input, olfactory input and auditory input and can be seen in all perspectives.
• Pictures are completely inaccessible for this child who is not using central vision effectively. (Central vision is essential for children to understand any 2D materials).
• Materials in morning meeting must meet any assessed need for motion. Shiny items are considered can seem to move due to reflected light. Movement should be gentle and slow not fast and frantic. Frantic motion can overwhelm the child.
• To foster looking at the presented morning meeting materials, light must be controlled, limiting the child’s lightgazing.
• Because light is important to encourage looking, light the materials that are presented or use materials that light up.
• Because fixation is brief, the material must be presented for longer so the child has another opportunity to visually locate.
• Because peripheral fields are stronger than central visual fields, the materials must be presented off center in the best assessed lateral visual field.
• The lower visual fields are often not functional well so eye level is recommended. Upper fields can also be inaccessible.
• Make sure the “action” of morning meeting is within their best assessed visual field.
• The child can only look at items in near space. The exact assessed distance needs to be respected and materials presented within this distance. This is typically within 18”-24” of the child’s eyes.
• Give the child a copy of the material being used with other child in turn. This provides visual access for the child even when materials are being presented to other children at greater distances.
• Faces are very complex. This child will have difficulty looking at faces. Be mindful that the child may be attending but not able to make eye contact or even look towards your face if you are talking. Greet them with your name and tell them what you will be doing with them. Call their name before delivering a message or asking a question. Research shows that adults often do not talk as much or as long to children without eye contact. Adults should be aware of this and monitor their behavior with children.
• Provide quieter environments. This can be difficult in a larger group of people. Consider having smaller morning meetings with a smaller number of children. Teaching assistants can be used when designing these multiple morning meeting sessions.
• Create morning meetings of less children so the movement, visual complexity and auditory complexity is more controllable. There is no rule that morning meeting needs to be all the children in one morning meeting. Have several smaller meetings.
• Provide non-complex backgrounds for all learning materials.
• Where non-complex shirts. You are the the visual background!
• Seat yourself in the same position as the child to see what the child sees. You will be surprised how much visual complexity you will notice and need to control.
• Position this child solidly for best visual skill use.
• Use familiar materials and familiar routines. Use consistent materials to build visual familiarity. Predictable routines in morning meeting will support visual recognition of materials and help children predict the sequences.
• The child will have increased processing time for looking for understanding what is seen. Using the assessment and taking data will help identify how long the child requires for visual attention, which visual field is faster and which visual field has the most sustained visual attention abilities. The material needs to be where the learning is accessible and for as long as the child requires.

 

Visual Experience, Joint Attention and Visual Features

Here are some questions to consider:

• What is the visual inaccessibility at distance for this child?
• How solidly is vision, cognition and language are linked for items in the child’s world?
• How is the child’s joint attention? (in typically developing, sighted children helps build these visual, cognitive and language skills through joint attention with an adult and these  are based on the child/adult experience.

It got me thinking about my own daughter’s visual, cognitive and language development. She was a typical developing toddler with full visual access.

We lived on our sailboat in Boston Harbor. We were surrounded by ducks daily. My daughter would see these ducks everywhere, everyday. (visual experience)

When she looked at or pointed to the ducks, we shared gaze to the ducks and I would label this animal: “Duck” (shared gaze, language)

As she language skills grew, she would begin to point and label them as “Duck” as well (building language and shared gaze).

When we traveled on land, she began to label other animals as ducks. She understood that dogs, cats and other birds we saw were not human but animals (cognitive). She over- generalized that any animal that was not human was a “duck”.

Sharing her gaze and sharing her experience, I pointed out the visual features that made these other animals different and labeled them as different. “No. That is a dog, he has 4 legs and is furry”. (cognitive, shared gaze and visual attribute features).

Very soon, my daughter was able to use her cognitive comparison skills to label each animal she saw with the correct name based on the visual salient features: shape, number of legs, how then moved, where they lived, how they sounded.

Supporting children’s visual, cognitive and language skills must be carefully planned, based on experience and presented at near by providing supports around visual attribute language. They must be presented in planned, accessible ways due to the inaccessibility of distance events and materials.  This link must be facilitated to build visual, cognitive and language skills by comparing and contrasting visual attributes that are experienced, highlighted and shared.