HKSB’s Children Learning Center: Alumni Parent publishes an book
James’s mother: James has been a student at Helen Keller, from the time of maybe three years old, when he started early intervention at Helen Keller. And from there, he went on to preschool and the last year of preschool was done remotely due to the pandemic. So. During that time he would get his speech, he would get OT, PT, basically everything virtually.
And I got to be his teacher and I got to learn how things work at Helen Keller, just basically Helen Keller at home with mommy, things something I never experienced. Like, I never knew that he did all of the work that he did in school until we got home and I had to be responsible to make sure he got all of the services. So Helen Keller was really showed me the way.
James is my visually impaired six-year-old son. But at the time he was actually around four, and we were home every day. He was doing virtual learning and there was a lot of language that was developed between him and I that I never experienced before this time.
So this brung about “Mommy, What do you see?” The title. That was just our common conversation every day. “Mommy, what is that, that I hear? Mommy, what does that sound? Mommy, do you hear that?”
There is not really much diversity when it comes to children’s stories. And it’s very rare that you see African-American visually impaired child on a cover of a book, holding a cane. So it’s just something that I wanted to put out there to connect with children that may look similar to James and have disabilities like James and not just visually impaired, but disabilities, period, you know, and for the parents, of course, the parents like myself who have to find their own resources to find ways to learn with their children to teach them things. [End of Transcript]
