Perkins Panda Early Literacy Kit

The Perkins Panda Early Literacy Program® is the culmination of a multi-year effort of our staff in collaboration with Odds Bodkin and educational leaders across North America. Continuing Perkins School's commitment to early education and intervention, this program is a unique compilation of materials that teach fundamental early literacy skills to children and help parents be more involved in their child’s development.

Included in the kit are three packets, each with an interrelated storybook, activity guide and cassette. In addition, there is a guide to additional resources, a story box and a Gund stuffed panda with a backpack that can hold a tape player. The storybooks all have uncontracted (beginning stage) braille, large print and high-contrast illustrations.

The Program has been designed for children with visual impairments, ages birth to eight years old, and the parents, families and professionals who care for them. It is equally valuable to older children with multiple disabilities, as well as to adults with visual impairments for use with sighted children.

What is literacy?

All too often, literacy is defined as the ability to read and write. While this might be the highest level of literacy one can achieve, this definition is too narrow and fails to look at both how literacy develops and its many variations.

To better understand literacy, we should first look at how it develops and some of the differences and similarities in the development of literacy for children with and without visual impairments.

The development of literacy is founded upon our experiences – beginning with birth – and our interactions with the world and those around us. Over time, these experiences enable us to develop the ability to connect meaning to words and letters. First, though, the path to literacy requires establishing communication and connecting meaning to objects, events and people in our world.

Click to download an early literacy presentation by Tom Miller, Educational Partnerships Supervisor (PowerPoint (requires Microsoft PowerPoint) or plain text).

Early experiences are at the heart of literacy development.

Through our senses, we experience events in the world. Through their repetition, we begin to anticipate their occurrence, and they begin to develop meaning for our lives. Through interaction with others, family and friends, we receive the language around these experiences, and we form a deeper understanding that words can communicate and express our desires to others. We begin to connect words with experiences, objects, and symbols (e.g. letters and numbers). And, we learn to use words through speech or writing to communicate our meaning and desires to others.

For sighted children, this process seems almost automatic. They are able to receive a full range of sensory experiences to enable them to quickly observe the patterns in their world and to connect words to these experiences and their symbols. They begin to identify objects, symbols and letters through their ongoing exposure via direct experience, television, and books. (For example, note the amount of information sighted children are exposed to during one episode of Sesame Street or another children’s show.)

For children with visual impairments – with or without additional disabilities – this seemingly automatic or incidental learning is not readily available.

In our primarily visual world, many experiences and the meaning of those experiences can be lost to children with visual impairments without special efforts on the part of parents and other caregivers to expose and interpret those experiences for them.

Touch, hearing and our other senses are not as efficient as vision in providing ready access to and understanding of childhood experiences. Understanding these experiences and connecting words or symbols to them, however, is essential to the development of literacy.

The Perkins Panda Early Literacy Program® is designed to start children with visual impairments and their families on the path to literacy. By encouraging shared experiences between families and children, it offers ways to expose the child with visual impairments – with or without additional disabilities – to essential early literacy skills.

Learning literacy skills for children with visual impairments is closely tied to how we as caregivers enable them to experience childhood activities and how we interpret those activities to give them meaning. Literacy development is tied not only to exposing children to books, but also to objects, symbols (e.g. pictures, tangible symbols), and written language (e.g. words, braille).

Every child is unique, and children with visual impairments – with or without additional disabilities – will develop literacy skills to a wide range of levels.

For some children, literacy will be their ability to get meaning from objects in their daily experiences (e.g. cup=drink; towel=bath time). For other children, literacy will mean using tangible or more abstract symbols both to organize their day using a calendar box system and to make choices or communicate their needs. Other children may advance to use more formal forms of literacy such as print or braille.

Literacy in its most basic form is the ability both to understand and to express one’s feelings, desires and experiences to others – a system of communication.

All children with visual impairments need to be offered the opportunity to develop literacy skills to the best of their ability. Literacy is founded upon early and ongoing meaningful experiences – experiences given meaning through creating a language-rich environment for ALL children with visual impairments. 

You can read more about the Committee that has developed the program, read some of the Endorsements we’ve received, or Shop Online.

Click to download an early literacy presentation by Tom Miller, Educational Partnerships Supervisor (PowerPoint or plain text).