To a blind child in Ireland, your Gift of Equine Therapy is like a secret surprise. That’s because, without their even knowing it, riding a ChildVision equine-assisted therapy horse helps them to build coordination, core strength, muscle tone, and sit upright! Even if a child is completely blind and may have trouble communicating, ‘horse sense’ can change everything. Before long their balance, communication skills, and confidence soar, all thanks to your gift of joy and generosity!
When you are very small and have severe sight loss, the world can seem a scary place. And it’s easy to shrink away. But with your Gift of a Sensory Story Session, even our littlest learners can be part of the action! Special multisensory ‘story sacks’ complete with bells that jingle, book props to touch and feel, and even the happy aroma of hot cocoa, let visually impaired children discover and build an image of their world through taste, touch, scent, and sound, activating new areas of the brain that spark big growth… because you helped make it possible.
After copyrighting permissions, scanning, braille embossing, binding, and materials, it’s easy to see why a braille leisure book like Harry Potter costs as much as €800! But without braille, our blind children and young people could never achieve full literacy. In fact, reading in braille activates the same regions of a blind reader’s brain as when you read a standard book in print – and ChildVision’s lending library is the only place for blind children to go in Ireland. Your Gift of a Braille Book will bring a bounty of braille to visually impaired boys and girls right here at home.
You don’t need the voice of a songbird to know that singing and music touch our hearts and our brains like nothing else can. And for a child with sight loss and multiple disabilities who mightn’t otherwise learn speech and language, your Gift of Music is positively life-changing. Starting before she was even six, little Aoibhinn’s language skills improved by leaps and bounds with the help of music therapy like the kind you can give.
It’s hard to learn how to walk, or even dare to crawl, when you can’t see what’s across the room. That’s why for a child who is struggling with severe sight loss in Ireland, your Gift of Mobility is miraculous. With or without a support cane, orientation and mobility training teaches visually impaired children to use special techniques like mental mapping, how to make the most of their senses in any surrounding, and more. You’ll help give them more independence in a sighted world, and that’s a great gift indeed.
Most people aren’t aware that children who are blind can have what’s called ‘residual vision’ – tiny bits of remaining sight that could help them immensely as they grow and learn. Your Gift of a Vision Assessment helps reveal what’s possible: creating a baseline for each child’s visual impairment, exploring what bits of vision they may still have, and how to make the most of that. More than 400 children and young people across Ireland come to us in need of a specialised vision assessment every year. Your gift of joy and generosity can help to provide the resources we need to provide them.
Our visually impaired learners are mastering so much about the world around them. Those who are able to read braille struggles to keep up because their advanced braille schoolbooks are getting larger and larger. With a portable electronic braille display like the BrailleNote Apex, they can could load all their braille files onto one device – relief! – and an iPad Mini adapted for things like voice navigation let them use the screen like their sighted friends.
Give the gift of tomorrow with your pledge of €21 or more monthly to a blind child at ChildVision, and you will guide a boy or girl through the years, birth through aged 23. From their days as an infant in Ireland’s only fully integrated crèche and pre-school for visually impaired children right through the transition years in our vocational education programme, you will bring them a far brighter future in a sighted world – a world that, without your help this Christmas, could remain forever out of reach. Please help if you can.
Each year ChildVision touch the lives of over 2,400 families in Ireland who have children with sight loss, many with daunting disabilities. So that the greatest number of children can benefit from your kindness today, ChildVision combines your Gift of Joy and Generosity with those of other caring people like yourself towards the full scope of our work. If a particular gift is oversubscribed, we will ensure that your donation goes wherever it is needed most. Please also know that while our stories sincerely represent the mission of, and children at, ChildVision, we do change names and details where necessary to protect the privacy of our extraordinary children and the equally extraordinary families who love them. Thank you so much.