Pretend Play Area for Preschool Students Who Are Blind/Visually Impaired
My students need new pretend play materials, including a kitchen. They actively use the pretend kitchen that is currently in my classroom, but it is decades old and missing several parts.
$1,210 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
I work at a school near Washington D.C. in Montgomery County, MD. We have an incredibly diverse population of students and all of our students receive free breakfast. Many of our students also qualify for free or reduced price lunch.
Within this school, I teach a class of preschool students who are blind or visually impaired.
I teach them specific skills they need to grow up to be independent. These skills include teaching them to read braille, teaching them to use a white cane, teaching them how to care for themselves, and how to use any vision they do have efficiently. They make me laugh and smile a thousand times a day and I work hard to make my lessons both fun and accessible. I feel honored to be able to work with such a unique group of students.
My Project
The pretend kitchen that my students currently have is extremely outdated and missing several of it's original parts and labels. I know my students would be overjoyed to have a new, durable pretend kitchen that would endure many years of active play and imagination.
Due to the impact that vision loss has on their incidental learning and understanding of the world around them, students who are visually impaired are often delayed in their pretend play skills.
In other words, children can only engage in play when it includes concepts that they are cognitively familar with. My students deserve a pretend play area that is both realistic and durable given that pretend play is such a vital area of instruction.
I also often use the kitchen area to create “settings” from a story that my students can explore before, during, or after I read a book. This helps my students receive more of the information that sighted children are able to process visually. For example, before reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I might place three different sized bowls filled with real oatmeal in the kitchen so that the students can better understand what is happening in the story I read to them later on. As I read the last few pages of The Three Little Pigs, I might pause and have the students “discover” turnips in the oven that I secretly placed there before I started reading. Needless to say, the pretend play area is an actively used area of my classroom.
In addition to the realistic kitchen and food, this project also includes educational materials that can be used to help teach my students with speech and language delays how to verbally label, match, and sort particular food items and build vocabulary important to pretend play with their friends!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Diana and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
