Traditional Nursery Rhymes and Games: Language Learning Experiences for Preschool Blind Children

Abstract

The young blind child tends to be limited in his experience with books, stories, and rhymes, a fact reflecting the combined influence of his own inability to signal his appetite for new and ongoing language play and the parents’ incapacity to identify, locate, and present to him new and suitable material. Suggestions for a definite, but informal, sequence of language-related activities, using songs, rhymes, records, stories, and some of Mother Goose, are made. Throughout, the underlying concept is that what the preschool blind population requires is not picture books without pictures, but intact literary material which is, nevertheless, accessible to the blind child's learning condition.