         |
 |
34: Exercise, Sports, and Recreation
[back to list of readings and cases]
Accommodations for Students with Mental Retardation
by Martin E. Block
- Confer with the collaborative team regarding the student’s mental abilities and limitations: Information from the student’s special education teacher regarding his or her ability to comprehend verbal cues will be important. The special education teacher and speech-language therapist can give you vital information regarding how best to communicate with the student. Also, find out if the student has any behavior problems and which behavior management techniques are used when the student does misbehave.
- Prepare classmates without disabilities: Provide information in general regarding mental retardation and specifically about the student who will be included in the class. Encourage students without disabilities to help the student with mental retardation in terms of understanding directions, understanding where to go and where to stand in activities and games, and how to practice skills correctly. Also, encourage students without disabilities to invite the student with mental retardation to join their stations or groups. Praise students without disabilities for befriending the student with mental retardation, and sternly reprimand students who tease, ridicule, or take advantage of the student with mental retardation. Students without disabilities should realize that the student with mental retardation wants to do well in physical education and wants to be friends with other students but that he or she may be shy or uncomfortable at first. Students without disabilities can help the student feel more comfortable by simply befriending the student during early physical education sessions.
- Do not underestimate the abilities of students with mental retardation: Given enough instruction, practice, and time, many students with mental retardation can learn skillful movement patterns. For example, most students with mental retardation, particularly those with mental retardation requiring intermittent or limited support, should be expected to demonstrate skillful throwing, striking, and catching patterns that allow them to be successful in a game of softball. Only after exhaustive efforts should less-skillful movement patterns be accepted (e.g., hitting a ball off a tee, throwing without rotating trunk). Most students with mental retardation also can learn to follow the basic rules of individual and group games and sports. There are many examples of Special Olympics athletes playing team sports such as basketball, volleyball, softball, and soccer. These players not only adhere to the rules of the game without any special modifications but also use more complex strategies and team concepts such as zone defenses in basketball and set dead-ball plays in soccer. Again, more instruction, practice, and time may be needed for these students to learn rules and concepts, but every effort should be made to give them an opportunity to learn how to play the game the correct way. Then and only then will these students have an opportunity to participate in community sport programs.
- Select activities based on chronological age rather than mental age of skill development: This is particularly true for older students (middle school and older). Although students with mental retardation may be delayed by 2 years or more in mental and skill development compared with their peers without disabilities, it is important that you teach skills that will allow these students to interact with their peers and develop recreation and fitness skills for postschool life. For example, assume that a high school student with mental retardation requiring extensive support has the mental abilities and motor skills of a 5-year-old. Although it may seem reasonable to work with this student on activities appropriate for a 5-year-old child (e.g., learning basic locomotor and manipulative patterns), such activities will not help this student participate in activities played by his high school peers or help him acquire the skills necessary to independently participate in recreational activities as an adult. Realistically, you may have to work on two or three targeted activities rather than all the activities typically conducted in general physical education. For example, you may want to work only on softball, basketball, weight training, and aerobic dance with a high school student who has mental retardation requiring extensive support because it will take this student a long time to learn the basics of these four activities.
- Think safety: Students with mental retardation often cannot anticipate potentially dangerous situations such as walking in front of a soccer goal when other students are shooting or moving in front of a target toward which students are throwing. Remind students with mental retardation (as well as students without disabilities) of the safety rules, and tell students without disabilities to be extra cautious of students with mental retardation (and to be cautious of other students as well).
- Provide direct instruction regarding how to play with toys and physical education equipment (i.e., actually show students how to play with equipment such as how to throw bean bags, walk on beams, toss and catch balloons): Students with mental retardation may not understand how to play with toys and equipment or how to interact with their peers or teammates. Have students without disabilities act as role models for appropriate play, and encourage students to invite the student with mental retardation to play with them. For example, if you are playing a cooperative game such as “musical hoops,” have other students in the class invite the student with mental retardation to share their hoops.
- Keep verbal directions to a minimum and use extra demonstration and physical assistance when providing instruction: Students with mental retardation do not understand verbal directions as well as their peers without disabilities, and they may miss key points during demonstrations. Help students focus on critical aspects of a movement by providing them with extra, specific verbal cues; demonstrating key movement components; and even physically assisting students to perform the movement correctly. Even if you are using a movement exploration approach, you may need to provide some physical assistance to students with mental retardation to help get the student “in the ball park” of the movement.
- Break skills down into smaller components: For example, if you are working on the task of hopping with a class of kindergartners, most students can learn the skill by breaking it down into three or four critical steps: preparatory position, place arms out to side, bend knee, simultaneously extend knee and hip to lift body up. For students with mental retardation, you may need to extend this task analysis into 10 steps.
- Measure progress and reinforce skill development in smaller increments: Students with mental retardation will learn, but their progress will be much slower than that of their peers without disabilities. Use various ways of detecting and reinforcing progress. For example, progress can include less-intrusive levels of assistance (e.g., going from physical assistance to demonstration, throwing a ball farther or with more accuracy measured in inches rather than feet, noting use of one or two more components in the overall locomotor or manipulative pattern).
- Be aware of limited motivation, particularly in activities that require physical fitness: Plan on providing external reinforcements (e.g., tokens, primary reinforcements, free play) to encourage students with mental retardation to perform activities that are difficult, such as running, sit-ups and push-ups, practicing the correct pattern for throwing, and so forth.
- Let students with mental retardation know that they will not be ridiculed for performing a movement or activity incorrectly or more slowly than their peers: Encourage students without disabilities to be patient with students with mental retardation and to praise them for trying difficult activities.
- Plan to help students maintain and generalize skills: For maintenance, you will need to give the student many extra trials after he or she acquires a skill to help him overlearn the skill. Similarly, students may not generalize skills from one environment to another. That is, if a student is taught how to bowl in the gym, he may not be able to perform this skill at a bowling alley. Therefore, you may need to teach critical lifetime skills in the actual environment in which the activity will take place. This is especially true for high school students who soon will graduate from school and will be using their motor skills in community recreation environments.
- Be prepared to provide compensations for processing problems, perceptual problems, and fitness problems: Students with mental retardation may not be able to process complex verbal instructions as quickly as their peers. Give them extra time to process information, and be prepared to repeat directions at a later time. Ask the student to repeat key parts of the verbal cues to make sure he or she understands what he or she is supposed to do. Similarly, some students with mental retardation may have problems intaking visual or auditory information, or they may have problems with spatial awareness. To help this student, actually set up activities in which the student can work on improving perception. For example, an activity at one station could include practicing going over, under, and between obstacles without touching them. A peer at the station can change the heights of obstacles to encourage the student to practice making correct decisions (e.g., when should he go over versus under?). In terms of physical fitness, allow the student with mental retardation to do fewer repetitions or run fewer laps at a slower pace than his or her peers. Encourage the student to try to improve his fitness by gradually increasing fitness demands, but be sure to reinforce even small amounts of progress. For example, most of the students do 20 sit-ups as a warm-up activity, but the student with mental retardation requiring limited support works on doing 5 sit-ups. Encourage the student to do additional sit-ups as the year progresses.
|
