Abstract

Global awareness about disability in inclusive development is increasing. Children with below average intellectual functioning present from birth or infancy cause limitations in ability to conduct normal activities of daily living are children with intellectual disability. This affects their learning abilities and social skills. While teaching these children concrete examples, visual demonstration and songs play a vital role whenever necessary. Most of us grew up listening to nursery rhymes. The ready-made rhymes available in media are made uniformly for the purpose of learning in a joyful manner, but it might not meet the language requirement of children with special needs. The ready –made rhymes lacks in adapting the language and the themes required. Considering the above challenge in teaching through the readymade available rhymes. A need was felt to study the efficacy of teacher-made rhymes in Malayalam for children with Intellectual Disability. The language and structure of the developed rhymes was easy and indigenous in nature. The efficacy of the developed rhymes on the selected criteria’s was evaluated. Seven children between 4-10 years of age with moderate and moderately severe Intellectual disability was selected, they had previous years of pre-school training. The rhymes were prepared by the researcher and taught using appropriate and interesting teaching learning material. A single group pre-test post- test design was employed for the study. A comparison of scores was done using descriptive and inferential analyses. Thus, the children with ID were able to understand the concepts of the created themes and exhibit expected outcome. The results revealed that Children with Intellectual Disability performed well in criteria like phonological awareness, memory and sequencing, speech intelligibility and comprehension of ‘wh’ questions.