As more classrooms enable disabled students to learn alongside non-disabled students, teachers are finding it both necessary and enlightening to teach students about different learning disabilities.
Yet while reading or talking about a disability can be useful, few lessons help students truly understand a learning disorder better than experiencing the disorder themselves.
Realizing the importance of such experiences, many teachers have been using the following learning disability simulation activity to give students a hands-on experience that reveals how people with visual processing disorders such as dysgraphia or dyslexia can experience activities like writing.
Educational Materials
- 12x12 inch mirrors (Have enough of these mirrors available for half the class and let students alternate using them).
- Sheets of paper with an image of a star outlined by a bigger star (Print enough of these “star sheets” for everyone in the class)
- Pens (Enough for all students)
Learning Disability Simulation Activity
- Place the students in groups of two and give each group a mirror and two star sheets.
- Instruct one student to hold the mirror at a ninety-degree angle to his or her partner’s star sheet.
- Now tell the other student to trace an outline around the star on his or her sheet – but only by looking at the image of the star in the mirror, not at his or her hand or the sheet.
Inevitably, students will find tracing the star extremely difficult since their minds are confused by the image in the mirror and cannot tell their hands which direction to go. Thus, while this educational activity seems simple at first, it soon becomes an almost impossible task for students to accomplish.
Now have students switch roles – allowing the student who held up the mirror to try and trace the star image by looking at its reflection in the mirror.
Teaching Kids about Disabilities
Immediately following this learning activity, the teacher should explain that many (but not all) people with learning disabilities have difficulties with spatial determination, which affects their hand eye coordination similar to the way the students’ motor skills were affected in the simulation. As a result, certain learning disabled people may write slower and have illegible handwriting, since forming letters requires more thought.
These learning disabilities can include (but are not limited to) dysgraphia, which affects a person’s ability to write due to fine motor-muscle control and/or processing difficulties, and dyslexia, a neurological condition that interferes with the way people take in and process language, making reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and/or arithmetic difficult.
The teacher should emphasize that these disorders have nothing to do with laziness or a lack of intelligence – as students discovered through the learning disability simulation activity.
Discussion Questions
Teachers can lead a classroom discussion with some of the following questions:
- How did not being able to trace the star make you feel?
- Does not being able to trace the star make you any less intelligent?
- What type of accommodations should a person with this type of learning disability have?
Read how teacher and writer Elisa Linovitz Snader is helping to educate children about learning disorders at Author Talks of Teaching Kids About Disabilities.
And read about other educational activities that help kids exercise their empathy and sensitivity at Anti-Bullying Program Uses Music for Healing and ClassroomsCare Donates a Million Books Each Year.
References:
Cohen, Sue and Elisa Linovitz Snader. Phoenix: BookPals Training Workshop, 2009.
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