PLAYGROUND FOR BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED TODDLERS AT THE CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER OF BNAI ZION MEDICAL CENTER

Bnai Zion Medical Center's Child Development Center (est. 1979) provides special-education nursery schooling to blind and visually impaired Arab and Jewish youngsters ages 1-3 from throughout northern Israel. The toddlers benefit from a spacious classroom and rooftop playground planned and equipped to meet the children's need for safe and predictable physical spaces in which to develop self-confidence and independent mobility. The playground is handsomely equipped with colorful crawling tunnels, rocking horses and tricycles, wooden building blocks, a dry pool filled with plastic balls, trampolines a few inches from the floor, a wooden gym ladder and even a toddler-sized climbing wall -- all intended to tap the youngsters' natural initiative, drive and courage to explore their environment. The rubber flooring's color-phased, broad yellow and black pathways can be followed by children sufficiently sighted to distinguish between light and dark.

For lack of funds, however, the playground roof is currently a grid of aluminum slats open to the sky. The structure, which has been designed to meet municipal building regulations, remains without the PVC ceiling that it is meant to support. Under these circumstances, on sunny days, the natural light casts a gridwork of shadows on the floor. This confuses the visually impaired children, who use the surface's color-phased markings to orient themselves. On rainy days, the playground cannot be used. Throughout the winter, the large, centrally located sandbox has been empty of sand and covered by a heavy tarp to guard against the rain; nevertheless, it contains several inches of accumulated rainwater that its surface has been unable to absorb and, in fact, poses some hazard to the toddlers.

GAN HAYELED – ETGARIM (CHALLENGES) PROGRAM 

Gan Hayeled (est. 1977) provides 350 developmentally and emotionally disabled children K-12 with structured opportunities for cognitive growth, social interaction, physical fitness and extracurricular enrichment. In the morning, the children attend special-education classes covering a range of basic skills; in the afternoon, they benefit from animal (pet) therapy, arts and crafts, movement and gymnastics, music, and outdoor hiking and camping. The Etgarim (Challenges) Program, created by and for severely disabled military veterans to enable them

to participate in almost every imaginable sport activity, in recent years has made its expertise available to seriously disabled children. Using ropes, bridges, ladders, swings and other equipment, Etgarim teaches the children teamwork based on cooperation and mutual trust. Gan Hayeled is eager to participate as an Etgarim site and needs funds to hire Etgarim's specially trained staff; purchase such equipment as ropes, bridges and ladders; and make minor structural modifications to its building in order to accommodate the site.

THE NEW MICHA CENTER FOR THE EDUCATION OF DEAF CHILDREN  

Three percent of the global population is located on the spectrum from hard of hearing to deaf. For Israel's Jewish population, this statistic holds true. For Israel's Arab population, due to intermarriage among relatives, the figure is seven percent.Treatment as early as one month after birth is critical for the hearing impaired, because if an infant doesn't use and develop the remnants of hearing, these remnants are lost. Furthermore, because children develop full language skills from ages 0-3, a deaf child who doesn't receive treatment, education and rehabilitation from birth is at cognitive, social and emotional risk.

The Haifa Micha Center (est. 1966) provides audiologic hearing tests and the fitting of hearing amplifiers and cochlear-implant stimulators, preschooling and rehabilitation therapy, and parental counseling and guidance to Arab and Jewish youngsters and their families from throughout northern Israel.  The New MICHA Center , due to open its doors in September 2007 to over 100 youngsters ages 0-6, features 2 infant-daycare centers, 2 nursery school classrooms, 2 kindergarten classrooms, therapeutic treatment and observation rooms, and a  state-of-the-art audiologic lab and auditorium. The building comes equipped with full acoustic features and insulation against outside and foreign noises. The architects have brought elegant taste and a playful imagination to the challenge of designing a building with highly specialized functions, whose unusual shape has been dictated by the rectangular plot of land made available by the Haifa Muncipality. The result is a long and narrow, ocher-and-cream colored, castle-like exterior and a natural-light filled, two-story, two-wing interior.