The children deviate too much from the expected range possession of the one or the other traits of their personality so much tha their needs becomes special. These group of children are termed as ‘exceptional children’ or ‘Children With Special Needs’. These children are in need of special care, attention and measures for the adequate adjustment. They are above average or below average.
Definitions
Some of the definitions of exceptional children are:-
a. According to Telford and Sawrey, “to be exceptional is to be rare of unusual”.
b. According to Crow and Crow, “The term ‘exceptional’ is applied to a trait or to a person possessing the trait”.
c. Kirk defines that, “An exceptional child is he who deviates from the normal or average children is mental, physical and social characteristics to such as extent that he requires a modification of school practices or special educational services or supplementary instruction in order to develop to his minimum capacity”.
Types of Exceptional Children
There are two types of exceptional children. They are-
i. Fortunate
and ii. Unfortunate.
Fortunate:- Gifted, creative, highly talented who possess capacities and potentialities in abundance in ine or the other fields of life.
Unfortunate:- Disable children, who are found to suffer a lot from one or the other deficits, deficiencies and inadequacies with regard to their potentialities, growth and development.
Diverged Needs of the Exceptional Children
a. Need for the awareness of one’s exceptionality.
b. Need for coping with one’s exceptionality.
c. Need for being accepted with their exceptionality.
d. Need for getting appropriate education.
e. Need for being independent in life functioning.
f. Need for the satisfaction of special learning.
g. Need for proper guidance and couselling.
h. Need for getting equal educational opportunity.
i. Need for special aids, equipements and assistive devices.
j. Need for gettimg incentives and financial assistance.
Special Education for Exceptional Children
Aims of Special Education
i. To help the exceptional children in realising and actualising their abilities and capacities to the maximum extent possible.
ii. To help them to know and accept their deficiencies as abundance of capacities upto possible extent.
iii. To help them in their adjustment to theirself and the environment.
iv. To help them in receiving instructions and learning abilities and specific individualities.
Revision of Special Education
i. Residential Institutions.
ii. Special Classes.
iii. Regular Classroom with Resource Room Facilities.
iv. Regular Classroom with Itinerant Teachers.
v. Regular Classroom with Teacher Consultant than Regular Classroom with Regular Setting.
Rationale of Inclusion in Education
a. Through inclusion, children with special needs gets unique opportunities to have education with the age peers without discrimination.
b. It provides the special children an opportunity in the shared educational experiences.
c. It helps to aim all forms of discrimination and promote collective participation of the children.
d. It helps to address all kinds of diversities arising from disabilities or abundance of abilities in the educational setting.
e. Inclusion helps those children to learn the art of living and thereby to get adjusted with real life situation as an independent individual.
f. it enables the disabled children to be self-reliant, self- supportive and self-confident.
g. It brings attitudinal changes at various levels and provide institutional change.
h. Inclusion of Children With Special Needs (CWSN) promotes typical peers to become more understanding of and to develop positive attitude towards their diverse peers.
i. Inclusion helps to develop the social skills to the special children like pragmatic language development, sense of belonging, friendship etc.
j. It develops a good sense and the exceptional children to share sone experiences as their non-disable peers.
