BARB PURVIS, Education Consultant:
So I'm going to talk first about hearing loss just really briefly, and then a little bit about vision loss and then about the combination of the two.
[IN Training (Part 1) slide 34 text shown on screen]
Title: Impacts of Hearing Loss
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Obviously a hearing loss is going to affect communication, even a minor one. I'm pretty sure I have a minor one now and you know I'm getting to the point of... huh, huh, huh. You know and here I am in this field I should surely be at the audiologist before now. Hearing is going to be inconsistent, in certain conditions it will be better and certain days it'll be better, fatigue will affect that. So they are just going to experience activities differently. What we're hearing, if you have a hearing loss you're going to hear it differently than this. Your either not going to hear it or you going to hear it differently. So that's going to affect, you know the sounds of the kids on the playground, what you hear coming from the kitchen when your mom's cooking, whether you hear it or how you hear it. All those early learning experiences are going to be impacted and you're going to be different.
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Title: Impacts of Vision Loss & Blindness
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So vision loss, we are going to talk to them more about bonding I already mentioned that okay. Kids with vision loss really can be apprehensive, because they can't see what's in front of them. Or if I do this I'm legally blind now. I sort of know there are people in the room I couldn't tell what any of your faces look like if I hadn't seen them before.Deafblindness is often described as a disability of access. Your world is kind of here okay, you can't hear what's going on out there, you can see what's going on out there.
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Title: Impacts of Deaf-Blindness
Deaf-blindness is often described as a disability of ACCESS
Combined vision and hearing loss affects
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So your world becomes very small, it affects your communication obviously, it affects exploration and effects mobility. Whether even want to move, how you move, how you engage with people with objects, with your environment. How much or how little you participate in that environment. How to build friendships, how to build social interactions, your visual and mental memory, if you haven't seen something how do you know it exists and how do you remember where it was, if you can't see it. Concept development, going to talk about all these things this afternoon, independence because you you do sometimes have to really rely on people, and incidental learning.