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or soothing a restive child As that particular
activity and technique became established other
adults could take over and after discussion
develop it further Adults also worked with
individual children either at the beginning of the
morning (when as each child arrived he was
helped to settle down with a Cellograph picture
to assemble or a simple jig saw puzzle or a
sorting game) or during later periods when
children learned to copy or make patterns using
a variety of materials or completed Frostig
worksheets (2) for the development of eye hand
co ordination At these times although the
material for each child was chosen by the master
teacher who would decide the appropriate level
of complexity in the light of the child s previous
performance the adult aide was responsible for
helping the chi Id to carry out the task having
observed previously how this should be done In
this way each child received extra attention and
encouragement from different adults all of whom
were interested in him and praised each efforttalking
about the tasks while trying to help the
child to carry them out provided yet further
language stimulation
In this way a broad but flexible pattern was
established for the morning s work Half way
through the morning the children had a fifteen
minute break for orange juice and biscuits - if
the weather permitted they were able to run on
the grass outside for a few minutes otherwise
the class continued with some movingabout
activity
Although when planning the activities of the
class different aspects of the work were con
sidered under specific headings such as
Language Training Perception Training
Motor Training in fact just as these different
aspects of the child s total ability interact and
overlap in normal development so the various
activities devised for the children were not
exclusive but merged into each other If the term
perception is very broadly defined as the
recognition of stimuli then in fact most of the
work done throughout the five weeks was directed
towards this end in helping children to recognise
and respond to auditory and visual stimulation
Children without language can respond approp
riately to a variety of visual stimuli even when
either through deafness or lack of understanding
of the meaning of language they are unable to
respond to certain specific patterns of auditory
stimuli, it has been shown nevertheless in many
research studies that language can be of assist
ance in dealing with complex visual discrimination
One aspect of perceptual disability that has
attracted much attention in special education in
recent years has been figure ground difficulty where
instead of being able to focus attention on one
particular aspect of a visual or verbal or tactile
pattern the child s attention is distracted and
diffused by the ground or background setting of
the pattern Early activities for the chi Idren were
planned to explore this ability at very basic levels
using concrete materials At the same time it was
planned to develoD gradually the children s abilities
to discriminate again using simple materials Each
time a child was asked to make a discrimination he
was rewarded with a raisin immediately if he made
the discrimination correctly and after showing him
the correct solution if he had been unable to achieve
it himself Discriminations began at the very simplest
level a red bead in a group of green beads identical
in every way to the red bead except in colour The
child was asked to give me the red bead and if he
did not understand the red bead was picked up by
the teacher replaced among the green beads and the
request for the red bead was repeated Even children
who did not understand language could copy the
action and did so whereupon they would be rewarded
with a raisin Next they would be presented with
the same task but using beads of a different colour
if they did not know what to do they would be shown
but in fact all children quickly understood the nature
of the task and would pick out the single bead of a
different colour- (it was found that all the children
could do this task so the Ishihara test of colour
vision was not used at this stage) The colour names
were always used and although children were not
expected to name the colours in fact many did so
as they picked up the bead of their choice In a
similar manner a round bead could be discriminated
from a group of square beads of the same colour, or
a big bead either round or square from other beads
identical in colour and shape but of a smaller size
In order to help the children to generalise from these
particular examples to a wider use the same
discriminations would be carried out using other
material felt cut outs in the primary colours of
small houses boats or aeroplanes or of circles or
squares tins and jars of different sizes to expand
the idea of big and small (the children began applying
this concept spontaneously to their raisin rewards
demanding a big one or commenting critically on
a small one ) Gradually number concepts of one
and two were introduced and double discriminations
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