Navigating in the School Building

After mastering travel in the home, the school offers the next good opportunity to expand the student's awareness (and vocabulary) of indoor spaces. Schools have hallways and they have classrooms. Classrooms are like any room with walls and floors, ceilings and windows, doors, smells, sounds, and textures. Classrooms also have chalkboards, computers, chairs, tables, desks, and the teachers area. They have bookshelves and heating vents. Once you know one classroom, all the rest are just slight variations on the main spatial theme. The same is true of hallways. There are drinking fountains, mats before doors, heavy doors that lead to the outside, radiators, lockers or coat hangers, display cases and the occasional pop or juice machine.

Besides the halls and classrooms, there are other typical spaces, a gym, a lunch room, the office(s), bathrooms, library, music room, and the nurses office. The biggest problem with schools is that they are bigger than houses, and they are full of rapidly moving sounds (talking, shuffling feet, and banging lockers).

It doesn't take long for a normal blind child to learn an elementary school. After grasping the kindergarten and first grade rooms, and after learning the hallways and routes to the various offices, it is easy for the blind student to negotiate their school from second grade on. Higher level grades (middle and high school) present busier, larger schools, with more crowds, more distracting sounds, and the demand that the blind student move faster over longer distances. But these larger schools do not contain any new challenges to spatial conceptualization.

There are still classrooms and hallways, drinking fountains and libraries. Most blind kids find no difficulty with higher grades once they master the basic in the early elementary years.

For the young child the school is a great place to begin learning skills and concepts that will be needed throughout life. Here are a few examples:

1. School hallways are long and straight and provide the student an opportiunity to learn about\practice kinesthetic travel.

2. The long school hallways are good spaces for the beginner to learn the diagonal cane technique and be introduced to the touch technique. It is also a good space beginning to learn the many uses of the long cane.

3. All the basic indoor orientation skills can be introduced and practiced in the school; mental and real mapping, route travel, reorienting after getting lost, etc.

4. The school is a good place for learning about traveling in crowded areas.

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