Equipment Modification: Hurdles
Modified hurdles is an innovative way to make this track and field mainstay accessible to students with multiple disabilities who are wheelchair users with and without visual impairment. Nancy Miller, Newmarket Elementary School in New Hampshire, and Michelle Grenier, University of New Hampshire, presented this at the 2017 SHAPE America National Convention & Exposition in Boston, MA.
Sample IEP Goals
- Shared Speech/PE Goal: Look toward speaker (listening and responding).
- APE Goal: Initiate communication and play by visual looking at peer or paraeducator, purposeful reach, gestures, or body movements.
- Shared OT/PE Goal: Reach and hold
- APE Goal: Pushing
Modified Hurdles: Turnstile hurdles—Create by inserting a 1-inch wide PVC tube with a 90-degree curve into the top of a safety cone that is wheelchair height. Cover the horizontal section of the PVC tube with a bright swimming noodle…..Overhead Sensory Hurdles—Create by using two safety cones and placing a pole (or PVC tube) into the top hole of each cone. Connect the two tubes with a swimming noodle to create an archway. Hang streamers from the swimming noodle.
Instructional Strategies: Para-educator stands on student’s left side and says his or her name, “NAME” when she makes VISUAL contact with hurdle (push bar or streamers). Provide the verbal cue, “REACH, PUSH” while giving a MANUAL CUE of hand-under-hand assist (of non-dominant hand) for the student to reach up with both hands to push the bar or streamers out of the way to pass through the hurdles.
- Visual cues: Sensory engaging hurdles to reach and push.
- Verbal cues: Reach, push.
- Manual cues: Hand-under-hand assist as needed
Para and peer look to see and respond when the student initiates conversation/plays using her communicative behaviors.
