Abstract:

The visual disability assumes, in the processes of teaching and learning, a particular connotation for the specificity that over the years the vision in the overall structure of knowledge has had. The whole western tradition on the knowledge stood on a vision "oculocentrico" of knowledge. The view has always been considered the "sense for excellence", the “Medium for excellence” (Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969). An educational activity, therefore, that emphasizes and promotes strategies of inclusion / integration of students with visual impairment is significant and essential to the whole class group.

We present here an experimentation with primary school children: in a closed bag, there are objects of everyday life: every time a child extracts an object and has to describe what he is touching. The teacher begins to distinguish between polyhedra and solids of revolution. For all solids children and teacher find relationships and focuse their attention on the polyhedra.

This activity provides an opportunity to understand the differences between different polyhedra; children compare objects that have similar shapes but different sizes: for example, children can discover that parallelepipeds have edges of different lengths while in the cube the edges have the same length. Both have the same number of vertices, edges and faces, but the shapes of the faces are different.

Teaching through the body may prove effective for teaching mathematics wich, very often, is hard to be learned because of difficulties that the child encounters in assimilating mathematical symbolism and, after, applying it to real life and the abstract context of academic problems.

The difficulty that the child encounters in the acquisition of a mathematical concept, is often due to the reason that he experimentes with the action too late; it is necessary, indeed, that the manipulative and concrete experience comes before the others.

Piaget stated that “the intelligence is a system of operations […] the operation is nothing more than action: a real action, but internalized, that becomes reversible. In order that the child comes to combine operations, whether numerical operations or space operations, it is necessary that he has manipulated, it is necessary that he has acted, made experience not only on pictures but on real materials, on physical objects” (Piaget, J. (1956). Avviamento al calcolo. Firenze: La Nuova Italia).

The child, therefore, learns by doing, and the body, in all its forms, becomes a useful tool for learning