My 11-year-old daughter Maya is visually impaired. She and I wrote a book to pass on what she's learned about adapting school yard games to be inclusive and fun for all. It was published today, which is very exciting for us.

This is the introduction:

Schoolkids love breaktime, mostly it’s a time for fun and one great advantage to having fun at school rather than at home is that you’ve got all your friends around. You can enjoy games that involve lots of players. Yet this pleasure and delight a child takes from schoolyard games can turn to frustration for someone with a visual impairment. Instead of being a participant in a game that clearly – from the sounds of laughter and cries of excitement – is being enjoyed by her friends, she has to find something else to do. Because although no one at all intends to be mean to her or unfair, she just can’t join the game on the same terms as everyone else. If it involves running away or hiding, for example, as so many games do, the player with VI is likely to stand still bewildered as her friends disappear from her limited view. There’s no reason, however, why all the kids can’t have fun together. It just takes a tweak of the rules or a change in the set up and the game can be played by the VI child more or less on a par with her friends (and for some games, like Blind Man’s Bluff, the VI child can have an advantage). And this can be done without spoiling the game for everyone else; without requiring anyone to curtail their own enthusiastic participation. In this short book we’ve set out the rules of around thirty popular schoolyard games and suggested adaptions to make them inclusive for VI children. They have been tried and tested by Maya and her friends. Our hope is that teachers, parents and kids will find this helpful and our suggestions, based on Maya’s experience, will lead to a lot of fun and laughter in other school yards. We have created a Facebook group: $1 and we’d love to hear from you, especially if you have other ideas for games that work really well for all players. Please post your thoughts there. Conor Kostick & Maya Kostick 2020

It's here as an eBook: $1

Teachers wanting a physical book should be able to order one from Amazon soon, we made it print-on-demand with Lightning Source.