Supporting Learners with Profound and Multiple Learning Disability (PMLD)
For children with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD), traditional education methods may not resonate. But what if learning could be tailored to their unique needs, opening a world of fun, discovery and independence? Enter HelpKidzLearn!
What is Profound and Multiple Learning Disability (PMLD)?
Children and young people with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD) face unique and complex challenges, but despite these challenges, they can engage in meaningful learning experiences and develop beautiful skills in ways that suit them best. Learners with PMLD may have multiple needs, including cognitive impairments, physical disabilities, sensory impairments, and complex health needs. Building strong relationships with children with PMLD and understanding their communication and access needs is essential to interpreting their responses and intentions. These learners often have limited understanding and ways of expressing themselves – sometimes using eye pointing, vocalisations and gestures to communicate. With appropriate opportunities tailored to their unique needs, learners with PMLD can continue to learn and grow, make choices and form relationships.
Learning that motivates.
Children learn best when everyday pressures are taken away from them and when the learning activities they’re engaging with, are fun! By working closely with teachers, carers, and therapists, we’ve crafted activities to suit the needs of children and young people with PMLD. The power of HelpKidzLearn products is that learners can develop a progression of important skills such as cause and effect, all whilst playing activities they enjoy. All of our activities feature bright colours, sounds, and simple images and all activities follow a generalised format of starting and ending activities in the same way helping to develop routines. All of our products use errorless positive reinforcement to motivate learners with PMLD. By celebrating their achievements, HelpKidzLearn products helps them to feel successful and build their confidence.
Game based learning.
Our Games & Activities product contains hundreds of errorless games that make learning fun and engaging for students with PMLD. They’re broken down into carefully graded learning objectives, starting with cause and effect. Learners with PMLD often learn at a slower pace because they can take longer to absorb information. Games & Activities allows learners to progress at their own pace and build confidence, allowing them to build on their skills gradually over time. They can also repeat activities as often as they like to build routine, confidence and understanding. We offer a wide collection of activities to suit all needs and preferences, including those with black backgrounds to provide a clear and uncluttered interface to avoid overwhelming learners with PMLD. For children with PMLD, often the main goal is to develop basic life skills. Games & Activities includes many games that promote independence such as ‘Clean Your Teeth’, ‘Comb Your Hair’, ‘Getting Dressed’.
Bringing stories to life.
Children with PMLD learn best through their senses. This can involve using touch, sound, sight, smell, and taste to explore the world around them. Activities that incorporate music, bright colours, different textures, and interesting smells can stimulate their curiosity and help them learn about cause and effect. With the wealth of resources and ideas found in Inclusive Stories, you really can bring a story to life. Allowing learners time to process smells, textures, and sounds while exploring each story and supporting their unique needs. Each story comes with a collection of resources including in-depth delivery guidance, assessment and recording sheets, props lists, printables, symbol lists for AAC, cross-curricular ideas, a recipe book and more.
An Insight to visual impairments.
Children and young people with PMLD often can have visual impairments to varying degrees. Our Insight software is designed to assess core functional vision skills using eye gaze through game-based activities. Its innovative technology helps to build a story of children’s interaction and engagement with activities within the Insight software. It allows you to build a detailed report to identify how students take in information and patterns in engagement, such as preferences for colours images and sounds.
Customised Activities with ChooseIt Maker.
With ChooseIt Maker, you can create personalised learning activities to suit your learners needs. You can turn familiar photos, images, sounds and more into activities. You can also adjust the colours and background colours to suit different visual needs. You can even use it as an AAC device! ChooseIt Maker also automatically records your learner’s progression and achievements, helping you to monitor and share progress.
Accessibility is at the heart of what we do.
We ensure that all our activities can be accessed with switches, touch, mouse and keyboard and not forgetting eye-gaze. This allows learners with the most complex needs to access HelpKidzLearn activities in a way that’s right for them. Each learner also gets access to their own student profile, which remembers their personal settings, including their preferred access method. This helps to save valuable time when signing in again or changing devices.
Magical moments with HelpKidzLearn.
Holland Bloorview
We love your website and use it frequently during our assessments and interventions for children with severe disabilities.
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital
St John’s Primary School
We have so many magical moments with our children when using the HelpKidzLearn software – they happen daily. We often get responses we’ve never experienced before such as a smile, look or movement, so we know the students are really engaged and enjoying using it.
Fran FrenchSenior Education Officer (SESO)
