Rooms have functions. The kitchen is for eating, the bedroom for sleeping and privacy, etc.
Rooms have functions. The kitchen is for eating, the bedroom for sleeping and privacy, etc.
Each room has specialized furniture or appliances that are needed to carry out the rooms function.
Almost all rooms have four walls, ie. they are rectangles or sometimes squares (there are 90 degree corners).
Rooms have one, sometimes two ways to enter or leave them. Some rooms have doors. Doors are often characteristic of the type of rooms they are located in (heavy doors with associated screen doors for front and rear entrances, lighter doors for the bathroom or to the basement, sliding glass doors to the patio, etc.
Rooms have floor surfaces that can help identify them (tile in the kitchen or bathroom, rug in the livingroom, hardwood floors in the dinning area. Floors can have characteristic sounds or feelings to them; they can incline or decline, sound hollow or solid, have bumps or slick spots, etc.
Rooms have characteristic smells.
Rooms have characteristic sounds (fans, the television, the aquarium the creaky floors, the television, etc.
Rooms are larger or smaller and therefore the echo is greater (in small rooms) or flatter (in large rooms).
Some rooms have windows with curtains or shades. There are different kinds if windows and window coverings. Windows serve different purposes (light control, temerature control, breeze control, odor control, etc.).
Rooms have chairs to sit on. The chairs often are customized for each type of room (lounge chairs in front of the TV, hardwood dinningroom chairs pushed up to the table, bean bag chairs in the den, stools in the kitchen, rocking chairs in the nursery, etc.).
There are open spaces in rooms that can be used as pathways.
Ceilings can be different in different rooms. Some are high, some are low (and the height affects sound). Some have fans on the ceiling, or vents or speakers for stero systems. Lights of various kinds are found in ceilings.
There are chores associated with rooms (food preparation, bathing, setting the table, throwing away the trash, etc.). The blind student should be involved in the chores (age approriate).
The characteristics of rooms can be introduced and then explored (playful exploration, child driven). Positional concepts can be introduced. Important words can be mixed into the conversation (landmark, clue, line of direction, etc.). Early orientation checks of initial position, and position after turns can also be used to find things in each room.
After landmarks are introduced, routes can be practiced (ie. known, highly familiar pathways can be re-explored discussing route travel and landmarks.
Advanced ideas like kinesthetic memory, map making, handling steps, and making the cognitive leap that all houses have similiar layouts, etc, can be revisted or introduced in the highly familiar setting of the student's house.
Indoor environmental concepts, like those explored above for a house, repeat in the world with comforting regularity. Once a room in a house is learned, it is easy to grasp an entire home, or to make intelligent guesses about the rooms in other houses.
It is important for students to understand that spatial layouts are both general and specific. Early exploration of a child's house offers the opportunity to discuss how the student's house is alike and different from all other houses. The child may or may not understand, depending upon developmental level, secondary handicaps and previous experience.