Activities for children with visual disabilities at pre-school age

The sense of sight is an important sense that provides people with the most important information about their environment. This means that every visual disorder has a strong influence on the life of people in a whole range of their activities. Therefore, it is essential to motivate purblind children already in the pre-school age to use their sense of sight in the most effective way. Thanks to a practice stay in two special nursery schools I was given a chance to get acquainted with problems of children with visual disorders. This field of the special pedagogy has interested me and I have decided to deal with it in my thesis called Games for children with visual disorders in pre-school age. The theoretical part opens with the basic fyziology of the organ of sight and the process of perception. The classification of child visual disorders and the education of pre-school visually impaired children are also presented in this chapter. The term "game", the classification of games and their meaning for the education and development of children with visual disorders are discussed as a part of the theory. In the second part of the thesis, physical activities that stimulate the visual perception and enable development of physical and manipulation skills of purblind children are suggested. A set of games covered with the topics "Winter fun" and "Fairy tales" was made for these purposes. The qualitative research method was chosen for the thesis. It enables to describe the proposed games in detail and to evaluate their impact in practice through the method of half-structured interview with teachers from two nursery schools. The last chapter of the thesis concludes with an analysis of the results and the evaluation of the proposed set of games in practice. The research shows that the children with visual disorders in the level of purblindness managed the games without any significant problems. When using appropriate aids and under appropriate safety conditions the children can take part in all physical activities as their intact peers