Five Tips for Successful Teaching at Home

Parents can make great teachers. We have some luxuries that teachers at school don’t always have...access to our kids when they are at their best and in a wider variety of environments. We don’t have to hurry. We don’t have to start the relationship from scratch every fall. We already know what motivates and delights our kids.

We can use these advantages for boosting our kids’ learning. Whether we support learning that is already happening at school or branch off with our own set of skills to learn, our kids can learn a lot at home. Here are five essential mindsets to make the most of the time we spend helping our kids learn.

1) Expect the best. Children tend to live up to the expectations of those people they value. Believe—honestly believe!—in your child. He’ll pick up on your attitude. Just as important, tell him you have confidence in what he can do. Be his most supportive cheerleader. Brag up your child’s accomplishments to others in her hearing, always ending with, “But then, it’s no surprise. We knew she could do it.”

2) Make learning interesting. Tie it in to your child’s passions. By relating the topic/activity to something child loves, you’ll keep her interest much better.

If she is crazy for penguins, let her practice her reading on books about penguins. Import images of penguins from the Internet into Powerpoint and let her write facts as captions to make a book. It can be as simple as her writing in the missing word in a repeating frame sentence on each page:  “Penguins _____ ....” She’ll remember—and read—“can” after this activity much better than if she copied the word five times on a worksheet!

Shark Toob toys

Work on ordering sizes using her penguin collection, letting her set them in a line from smallest to largest. Use penguin manipulatives to practice adding and subtracting facts to ten (check out all the types of “toob” sets available through Amazon.com using their search feature; Michael’s Crafts also carries them. They come in every theme you can imagine!).

Bring in music. Maybe I’m dating myself, but I still remember grammar rules from “SchoolHouse Rock” songs played during intermissions between cartoons. Oh, and facts about the solar system from an astronomy operetta we learned in 6^th grade. Check out SongsForTeaching.com to preview some fun song-fact CDs you could sing together in the car to make good use of that time driving back and forth to therapy. Or type a search into YouTube for “(your topic) songs.”

Make drill work into a game. There are many more ways to practice drill than on worksheets or flashcards! More-than/less-than is pretty ho-hum as a worksheet exercise, but everybody loves a rousing game of War (the new politically correct name is “Top It.” Parents have no idea what that is. It’s just the same good old game of War we grew up loving).  

Touch your head it the number is even, touch your toes if it is odd. Or convert true/false into a Simon Says game; if the fact is true, do the motion. If the fact is false, don’t change to the motion.

There are way too many sources on the Web to list for free online games to practice skills. Just type “free online (your skill) games” into your browser and check out the pages of results! You’ll need to preview them first, because some may require responses that are beyond your child’s capability (i.e.: a child with motor issues might get frustrated with a timed game).

Switch out modes if possible, so that kids get practice at the material in lots of ways. It’s more interesting and it will help them generalize the information later. Sometimes we read a book, sometimes we read the captions on the bottom of a movie (by the way, it’s a great idea to leave the closed captioning ON on your television if you have budding readers at your house and especially if your kids are working on developing rate/fluency!), sometimes we read the words on road signs or cereal boxes.

3) Make learning meaningful. Give it a purpose, a function. Transferring walnuts from one bowl to another is (y-a-w-n) BORing fine motor work. Transferring wrapped candies into goodie bags to pass out to trick-or-treaters gives fun purpose to the same task.

4) Keep practice short but make it often. Do you know what an amazing opportunity sits in front of you if your child needs supervision during toileting? My daughter has memorized so many things during toilet time—sight words, spelling rules, math facts, the order of the planets, anatomy of a fish, you name it! We keep flashcards for memory work on a shelf above the toilet. Working through them 5 minutes at a time, 5 – 6 times a day makes for a great schedule!

If toilet time isn’t an option at your house, try to find some other daily ritual that lends itself to short bursts of practice...often. How about 5 minutes of practice at the end of meals? Waiting for the school bus? In the therapy waiting room?

5) Relax and have fun! Learning isn’t a race. What your child doesn’t learn today, he can learn tomorrow. Take a deep breath—it’s really okay. If something just isn’t sinking in, come back another day, another month and give it a fresh go. Parents have a lot more leeway in this area than the school does so at home, especially, relax. Learning should happen for a lifetime, and so if it something doesn’t click today, you have all that lifetime to keep working on it.  

Learning at home can be very rewarding and lots of fun to boot! Here's a challenge for you...think about what might you help your child learn at home. Did you find any ideas here that might make it successful? Is there something I missed that other parents would benefit knowing about? Be sure to let us know what you are doing!

Also, take a look at Barbara’s blog carnival at TherExtras. She’s asked parents to share what they taught their children...you might get some really terrific ideas there!

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Get Inspired for Summer Learning Fun!

May is winding down, leaving just a few weeks until glorious summer vacation! This gives parents a couple weeks before school dismisses to plan learning activities to keep our kids’ minds active and skills sharp over the summer. Are you ready?

Please don’t feel overwhelmed! Just a brief activity, every day if you possibly can, will go far to keep the Boredom Monster at bay.

Our family will be staying home this year with our farm critters. And the cost of gas makes all but the shortest of day trips cost-prohibitive. How will we make the most of those lazy summer days? You are welcome to take a peek at our plans...

Every year we have an informal family “summer school.” Not only does it benefit the kids, it fills my deep teacher-longing, since I’m not in a classroom much these days. In fact—true confession—I thrive on this. It’s sick, I know, I know...

But PLEASE don’t worry if you don’t have such an inclination! If you can steal just one tiny idea from these overly-ambitious plans, you will go far in helping keep your kids’ summer interesting.

For any families considering homeschooling, summers are a great way to dip your toes in the water and see if it’s a fit.

Typically, our girls start dropping eager hints about what they’d like to study along about January. Some years they agree on one topic; other years each has launched off on her own.

Some of the topics we’ve studied in the past include:

·        Animal studies--dogs, bugs, emus and penguins

·        Weather

·        Detectives

·        Units inspired by books, like the year we learned about pirates and read an all-time favorite, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi. Another summer we did a history study based on the Samantha books series from American Girl.

·        Researching the area or state where we’ll be vacationing

·        The possibilities are as endless as your creativity.

Mount Saint Helens,
May 18, 1980
USGS photo

This year, the girls were a little slow to come up with topics, so my husband suggested we study volcanoes and visit Mt. Saint Helens. What a great idea!

What will we be learning?

·        SCIENCE:  That’s a given! We can learn about plate tectonics and seismology and volcanoes and environmental recovery. I’m on the lookout for some good experiments on pressure and release, if you know of any. 

·        TECHNOLOGY:  In addition to learning how seismographs and other instruments work, the kids can develop their computer research skills. I’d love to see them sharpen their PowerPoint skills...maybe they could simulate an interactive display that you might find at the volcano’s visitor center...hmmm.

·        HISTORY:  Not only is the recent history of Mt. Saint Helens interesting (I was driving home from college the day it blew), but some of the famous blasts of the past (Vesuvius, Pompeii, Pinatubo...) are pretty mind-boggling and history-changing. What about the economic impact of the recent volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, in Iceland? 

·        READING:  This is an area where free choice reigns. What matters most to me is that my kids are reading daily.

We’ll sign up for the public library teen reading program. My older daughter has already signed up with our state Talking Book and Braille Library program; their prize for reading 1000 minutes is a blank cartridge for the new digital book players! Wahoo!

Of course, there is plenty of topical information the kids will be reading for projects, so they’ll get practice reading non-fiction. But most of all, I want them reading literature they love.

·        WRITING:  Some years this is directed; some years it is personal choice. There are a few project-related writing activities I have in mind (a brochure for Mt. Saint Helens, a script to go with that interactive PowerPoint for the visitor center), but mostly I want to give time for free writing and journaling.

 

When they were younger, we made stacks of books that the girls re-read throughout the year. What a fun way to keep the memory of summer alive during dreary winter days!

 

·        MATH:  I love summers for having time to close up those gaps in math understanding! Without naming any specific math curriculum our elementary school used, we’ll just say my kids still have gaping holes in their math concepts and skill mastery.

      It’s a great time for mom to pull out old-fashioned math instruction. Call me a fuddy-dud, but these tried and true techniques taught me math...which is more than I can say for the “experimental” system my girls grew up with. Enough said.

 

Some years, math fits well under the umbrella of our topic. Other years, not so much. I don’t worry terribly about it.

There are so many practical applications of math around home: multiplying fractions as we double a recipe, calculating seed coverage in the garden, estimating costs as we plan our trip to Mt. Saint Helens...

·        THE ARTS:  Ooooh, I’ve been waiting until my girls were old enough to tackle frame animation...a volcanic explosion would be a very exciting culminating project!  

For instant projects for younger kids, there are great collections of art and craft books at the library. I’m especially fond of the Williamson Kids Can! Book series (here’s one and another one).

My youngest is heading into a phase of life where test-taking strategies take on new importance, so that will be a subplot in our little volcano story. Much of that can dovetail with math.

This may all sound ambitious, but don’t be fooled. We only try to hit a couple subjects every day. Most days only see about 60 – 90 minutes spent on “summer school” (and some days we skip all together).  Once in awhile, the girls will get so caught up in a project that they spend most of the day on it!

A new wrinkle for me is that this is the first summer I’ll be blogging. While I know it will be hard to post regularly, I’d love to share some of the ways we adapt activities and materials to make them accessible. Maybe that will inspire similar summer learning projects for you and your darlings to enjoy.

Above all, I want families to enjoy learning this summer! It can be spontaneous and delightful. It can be delightfully planned. Whatever fits your summer style, I hope you will find lots of ways to keep your kids’ minds stimulated.

What do you do with your kids over the summer to keep their minds active? Please do share in the comments below! I can always use a good idea or three...and our other friends can too!

SEN Teacher...it's for EVERYBODY!

One of the greatest finds on the Web for educational materials is SEN Teacher.  If you have never visited this incredible site, then today is your lucky day! SEN Teacher was developed for special educators, but it has a goldmine of goodies that are extremely helpful at home and in general ed classrooms as well. I used this site a lot when homeschooling and with general ed students as well as my kids on IEPs. Did I mention that it is free?

Home screen for SEN Teacher

The site is very well organized; so much so that it is rather pointless for me to take you on a “guided tour.”

The printables sections alone are amazing resources that makes this site worth your time. The activities meet the learning needs of students at every difficulty level, so even high school math teachers will find some hidden gems in the math section. Even worksheets that look at first glance to be elementary can be customized to reinforce some pretty challenging skills.

I love, love, love the math worksheets, which are fully customizable. Even coin values are customizable for various countries, from USA to Euros to Australian coins. There are 26 different customizable printables for math alone! The clock and money worksheets are some of the clearest to read that you will find on the Internet.

One of my very favorite math activities with second graders uses the Number Square worksheet. Print up the page using only a partial fill (50% or 75% of spaces left empty) and have students fill in the blank spaces. You can also set it to skip count by 2’s, 5’s, or other increments (great for older students practicing multiplication facts). Once the kids are good at this, cut the sheets apart into jigsaw shapes along the lines. Children fill in the blanks of their own piece and then work together in small groups to fit the pieces to a complete a full table.

Number Square set to 50% fill.

The literacy printables include lots of fine motor and handwriting practice, as well as early phonics and site word skills. Again, you can customize most of these sheets to fit the needs of your particular students

The “other” printables has some things you must see if you need picture cards (for any reason, but especially for symbol communicators). Check out the AAC Photo Cards, which is a truly fast and customizable card printing tool. It is one of my all-time favorites for photo image symbol cards because of its ease of use and limitless library. Just type in the words you want on the sheet and SEN Teacher searches through a half-dozen copyright free sources for high quality images to match. If you don’t like a particular image (say, the background is too cluttered), you can repeat the search until the program opens an image you like. You can narrow the searches tightly too; don’t settle for “dog” or “goat” when what you want is “Golden Retriever” or “Saanen.” The AAC Photo Card search can handle your very specific request! Oh yes, it also comes with pre-authored sets if you just need a quick group of “farm” or “school” words.

AAC Photo Cards allow you to create photo symbol cards
to meet very specific criteria in a matter of seconds

If I could change one thing about the AAC Photo Cards, it would be the ability to assign a mix of border colors on a single page. But you can get around this a bit by putting all nouns on one page (print with orange borders), verbs on another (print with green), etc.

On this “print other” tab, you will also find a number of emotions activities using realistic photos. I have a bit of a stretch seeing how a few of the expressions show the assigned emotion, but overall, it’s a great resource for children who need practice at reading expressions.

You will find fabulous online resources through the “web links” tab, including information on various disabling conditions, additional educational resource links, and a collection excellent special needs sites.

The “downloads” tab shares dozens of free games and other resources that can be downloaded to reinforce any number of learning areas, including math, computers, science, communication, art, and other areas. It’s a great place to find games for extra practice…have fun looking them over!

SEN Teacher is one of those amazing resources that you will wonder how you ever lived without. Even if you are a parent looking for some great activities to reinforce the academic and social skills your child is learning at school, this is a valuable link to add to your Favorites bar!

Have a lovely weekend,

Rose-Marie

Adapting Books for Computer Access

To become readers, children need to read. According to Dr. Karen Erickson, one of the nation’s leading experts on literacy for people with disabilities, children need access to 1500 books to develop literacy. In order to qualify, these books must be accessible to the child.  

But kids with severe motor or reading challenges may not be able to access traditional books. We have talked about adapting books to make them more physically accessible. But even these adaptations don’t allow independent reading for every child. What if a child cannot hold a book at all or turn its pages? What if he has not figured out how to decode writing and needs to have the book read aloud so he can stay engaged?

For kids with these issues, the computer opens up wonderful possibilities for access to books. It can remove some of the physical and cognitive barriers that make traditional books inaccessible. They can hit a switch to turn the page, or even have the pages turn automatically. You – or the computer, if yours is equipped with a pleasant voice – can read the text out loud.

Through the computer, kids can have access to the same books used by their classmates, just in a different format. They can have opportunity for pleasure reading.

And there’s more good news – it is easy to adapt books to read on the computer! Once you get into a rhythm, it even goes pretty quickly.

There are plenty of commercial software programs commonly used with students in special ed classrooms that can display books on the computer:  Classroom Suite, Clicker, BoardMaker, My Own Bookshelf…the list goes on.

The good news for families – or for school districts affected by the current economy – is that books can also be easily created in PowerPoint, a program commonly found on the average computer. I’ve never used OpenOffice’s Impress myself, because my computers have always had PowerPoint, but my understanding is that it can be used similarly – for free!

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of creating an adapted book, let’s take a minute to talk about copyrights and Fair Use. Copyright law prohibits the willy-nilly copying and dispersing of materials to protect the interests (and livelihood) of those who created them. The Fair Use Act says that materials can be adapted for access by people with disabilities, provided we follow certain guidelines. We must own the book, for example. The adapted form is for use only by the person having disabilities (i.e.: we do not sell or otherwise circulate the adapted material).

Here’s a great way for teachers to demonstrate Fair Use as they adapt books. Save the adapted copy to a disk which is then stored inside the front cover of the book. This demonstrates ownership of the book – it’s right there in your hand, after all, and not on some library shelf! It also makes organizing a breeze, because you know where the disk should lives.

Okay, with that under our belts, let’s get started! I’ll walk you through an adaptation of Joyce Dunbar’s book Baby Bird (Scholastic, 1997).

1) Create a new folder on your computer desktop and name it for the book. Important: you will drop EVERYTHING related to this book in this folder. It will save you time not to have to fiddle with a finding the file each time you need to open it. Trust me.

2) Take a “picture” of the front cover and all the pages of the book. You might like to scan them on a flatbed scanner, which allows you to fold lots of laundry at the same time. It also tends to result in less “doctoring” later. Save the scans to your Folder.

You might prefer to snap a picture of the pages with a digital camera, which is a very fast way to accomplish the capture. It also works well for oversized books that don’t fit on a scanner. Just be sure your camera is steadied at the same exact distance for every shot. And use high resolution. Import them to your Folder.



This is how I set up for a “book shoot.”  
A Velco strap on the tripod anchors the camera to a chair.
The tape on the floor keeps everything lined up j-u-s-t right.



3) Correct the pictures in a photo program (I use Paint.net – it’s free and easy to use).

            -- Crop out anything around the edges of the page.

            -- Adjust for brightness if needed (the pages may need some corrections along the spine, too).

            -- Adjust any tilting (sorry, Paint.net doesn’t do this…better to shoot straight)

            -- Name the pages (00, 01, 02, etc.) and save to the Folder.

4) Set up your PowerPoint template. For a VERY complete discussion on this, check out Create Talking Books: PowerPoint from the Assistive Technology Training Online Project. It gives you links to Richard Walter’s ever-so-complete guide to building a template from scratch, How to Create Talking Books in PowerPoint ’97 and 2000. As well, you will find an 8-page quick start guide. And a template. 

If you want to build your own template, whether in PowerPoint or one of the assistive software programs, it’s basically a blank page with next page/previous page buttons. You may wish to have pages “turn” automatically or to enter a delay feature to prevent rapid-fire switch hitting.

            -- Open PowerPoint and set the slide for a blank layout. I’ll use PowerPoint 2007 in the  screenshots. I like to activate the gridlines (“View” tab) so I can line things up nicely.

            -- Add page navigation buttons. Place a Previous Page action button to the lower left corner and a Next Page button to the lower right (Insert > Shapes > Action Buttons). Size them equally, making them large for fledgling mouse users or small for switch hitters, using the gridlines as a guide.

            --If you want a clickable button to speak the text, add an optional Play Sound button. We’ll come back later to adding speech, but for now, if you want human narration, slip that button into the template.

            --If you need to set a delay to prevent repetitive hits (or just slow the kids down so they are more likely to engage with the text), cover the whole page with a Magic Invisible Box (Insert > Shape > rectangle). Temporarily, it will block out the page; that’s okay. You want the rectangle to block access to the buttons and then “disappear” so the buttons become available to act. Select Animations (1) > Custom Animation (2) > Add Effect (3) > Exit (4) > Disappear (5). Decide how much time you need the navigation buttons to remain unavailable and enter this in the timings.

Now doubleclick “disappear” setting to call up the Disappear Effects box (1). In the Timing tab (2), select “after previous” (3) and set the number of seconds to delay (4). This can vary according to your student’s needs. NOW format the rectangle shape to “100% transparency” and “no line” to make it invisible. "No Fill" will not substitute here; you need 100% transparency to make the magic happen!

            -- To make the pages forward automatically instead, set the slide transition (Animations (1) > Advance Slide (2)) to advance automatically after a set number of seconds. You can adjust this up or down to accommodate different lengths of text once you start filling in the template.

            --Save the template to your Folder.

5) Import pictures to the template. Be sure to line them up with the gridlines so every picture has the same dimensions. This makes for a much smoother read!

6) Adapt text if needed. Your student may need the text to be rewritten in a larger or simpler font or reduced in amount. Also, if you plan to use text-to-speech with this book, there must be “written” text for it to recognize rather than a photograph of text. I like to cover the existing text with a rectangle, set the rectangle shape to “no line,” and then color-match it as close as possible using the Custom Colors dialog box. If you move it so the bottom-right corner is close to your text box, you can eyeball a pretty decent match.

An interesting utility for perfectionists might be OB Utilities’ Color Picker (whose trial offer freaked out my Norton antivirus, so I couldn’t test it to give an opinion).



This is the same page as the last picture, only with a text box
added on top of the original writing.
Isn't that so much easier to read



7) Add narration if desired. There are several ways to go about this.

To narrate individual slides with a human voice, you can Insert (1) > Sound (2) > Record Sound (3). Click the red dot on the Record Sound pop-up and save it the Folder. It creates its own little sound icon, which you can enlarge to cover the sound button at the bottom of the page.

If you record outside of PowerPoint using something like Audacity (free, wahoo!, gives you lots of control). PowerPoint uses .wav files, so it’s easy to export these from Audacity to your Folder. Hyperlink this sound (faithfully saved to your Folder, right?) to the button at the bottom of the page.

You could also have the narration play automatically with a delay if you attach it to the exit action of the Magic Invisible Box (see Item #4, setting up your template). Look under the “effects” tab for sound settings; here is where you attach the sound file from your Folder.

Another option is simply to narrate the whole book, rather than individual pages. To do this, click the View tab (1) > Record Narration (2) > OK to the pop-up box (3). Choose where you want to start (the front cover is a good place!) and walk through the book, reading aloud as you go. The narration will record BOTH your voice AND the timing for each slide.

One last option is to have the computer read the narration. For this, you will need a free Add-On called PowerTalk. It will read the text you have typed onto the page. To use, launch PowerTalk first, then the PowerPoint presentation or show you have saved.

8) Save the PowerPoint to the Folder. Burn the Folder and all it’s contents to disk. Keeping everything in one folder insures that the sound files will copy with the PowerPoint. You can certainly save a PowerPoint package, but I like the freedom to access the original creation and make adjustments for future students – or your own child as she progresses – with different skills. I like to also save a PowerPoint Show (.pps) copy that cannot be altered. This avoids, er, accidental changes. If you include the student’s name in the filename, you will know you are opening a copy that is accessible to that student.

 9) …and store inside the front of the book. Here are a couple tricks make this storage system work especially well.

1)      Print labels for each disk from a picture of the book jacket. This makes it easy for students to match the pair before putting them away. I personally use Avery Dennison’s “CD Stomper” and labels.

2)      Fix a paper computer sleeve or an envelope to the inside of the jacket with clear packing tape or clear Contact paper to make it strong.

3)      If the books will be carried by students (let’s say you have a wonderful helper who does cleanup for you), I recommend facing the opening of the enveloped towards the spine. This keeps the disk from sliding out.

The envelope on the right keeps the disk from slipping out
when the front cover is closed.

There! It sounds more complicated than it really is. Once you make a book or two, you’ll be able to crank them out in little time. Also, for teachers, this is a great job to assign to parent or high school volunteers, especially those who can only help out from home.

Let’s get reading!

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Adapting Books for Physical Access
Adapting Picture Books for Lap Reading

Adapting Books for Physical Access

Books that are loved by kids sometimes get loved hard. One of my favorite keepsakes from my girls’ infancy are picture books they asked to have read over and over, and that they themselves devoured on their own. I use the word “devoured” quite deliberately; my oldest daughter ate all the corners off her favorite Kittens are Like That. While it makes this memento especially dear to my heart, we can’t have whole libraries consumed by little teeth.

When kids “read” on their own, their books sometimes need protection from exuberant little hands or lips. And sometimes books need to accommodate fine motor issues to be more accessible. We are going to cover these issues today.

Increase durability. The suggestions below work well to ward off accidental bumps and bruises to books caused by difficulties grading movement, myoclonic jerks, yanking books away from others, forgetting how to handle books carefully, and drooling. I don’t know anything that can make a book stand up to deliberate destruction. PLEASE leave a comment if you have an idea for that!

·        Board books. The titles printed on cardboard is ever-increasing, so check to see if the one you want is available. Classic favorites, such as Goodnight Moon and The Hungry Caterpillar, are easy to find. Longer selections from authors such as Marc Brown (Aurthor's New Puppy and D.W. Thinks Big) can be found if you search.

·       Laminate pages. The hardest part of this is sacrificing the binding of the commercial book, tearing it apart to laminate the pages. Does that violate every sense of propriety for you the way it does me? After each page is laminated, lay the first page against the second and use wide clear strapping tape to secure them together. Turn the second page and lay the third against it, taping where the pages meet. Continue until all pages are taped. Place the covers face down, leaving a slight gap between them, and tape. Now lay the taped pages inside the covers and tape at the binding. Use clear contact paper to cover the outside of the book and strengthen the binding.

If you look hard at the end of the arrow, you will see the edge of the strapping tape.
The folded-over edges of the clear Contact paper covering are also visible.

     Some books arrive with staples at the spine, and these are even easier to take apart. Remove the staples and laminate each two-page spread. You can re-staple them to the cover if you have access to a book-maker’s stapler. Or, try stitching down the spine with dental floss and an upholstery needle in long 1/2" - 1" stitches. Go from bottom to top, and then trace back down through the holes you made previously. Tie off and cover over the stitching on each side with clear strapping tape.

These stitches are about 1/2" long and have been covered over
with strapping tape for durability.

• Use page protectors. Cut apart books (or make your own) and insert them into plastic page protectors. For heavy droolers or fingers that seek to destroy, seal the open end with clear strapping tape.

Facilitate page turning.

• Page fluffers. These separate the pages to make them easier for fingers to slip between. Some even allow pages to turn with a gross swipe. If you have adapted story books with Velcro to hold symbols, the Velcro may be enough to spread the pages. There are many lightweight objects that can be used to fluff pages apart, but my favorites are the temporary ones taught by Karen Erickson. These can even be used in library books until they must be returned. 



           

            You’ll need:

            Oaktag (or manila file folder), cut in 1 1/2” strips

            Small paper clips, a whole handful

            Self-adhesive foam weather-stripping

            Slide paperclips, small loop on top, across the length of oaktag. Space the clips every inch. Remove the backing from the weather-stripping and stick it across the small loops of the paper clips, aligning the edge of the weather-stripping with the edge of the oaktag strip. Cut apart, centering one paperclip in each fluffer.To use, slide the book page between the long loop of the paperclip and the oaktag, offsetting each fluffer from the one before it.   

A page fluffer attached to the edge of a book page.
(My apologies for the sideways photo...
irritating software glitch!)

Page turner. These are “tabs” that stick out from stiffened pages that may be easier for hands to use. You can use popsicle sticks held with clear packing tape or daily contact lens cases glued to the edges of board book pages.

Next week we’ll talk about computer-adapted books for kids who cannot manipulate physical copies of their stories or need additional auditory input. I hope you are looking forward to it as much as I am!

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Adapting Picture Books for Lap Reading

Sensational "Sorts"--Part One

Today I want to share a fabulous method for helping kids with (and without!) all types of disabilities to respond in their school work. The concept is called “sorts” by the team that wrote Words Their Way (4^th ed., Bear et all, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008). When I stumbled across the third edition of this book at the library a few years ago, I felt like I’d just hit the gold miners’ Mother Lode! Here in my hands was a direct answer to the question "How do we know kids are reading when we can't hear them read out loud?" Finally, we had a way to glimpse into how their minds perceived the sounds they cannot make with their mouths.  Immediately it had my mind whirling over other applications for non-verbal learners with and without severe motor impairments, and yet I’ve learned as I applied the techniques in the classroom that it is also a great strategy for students with autism and a variety of learning disabilities.

In lay terms, “sorts” allow students to categorize information based on specific features. Kids have been doing this naturally for as long as anyone has kept track, and this system structures the sorting to let kids focus on the information we want them to learn. In Words Their Way, the sorts focus on phonics, spelling and vocabulary skills, but the applications to reading comprehension, science, social studies, social skills…most any subject!...are limitless.

Let’s back up to look at what goes on when children sort. We’ve all seen infant toys with holes for sorting shapes. The toy has several purposes, but the one we’re talking about today is its ability to focus the child’s attention on a key concept. The child looks at each block to evaluate its shape, decides which shaped hole it fits, and fits the block in the hole.



Photo courtesy of ethan j at Flickr’s Creative Commons


Academic sorts do the same thing as the infant’s shape sorter. The student looks at a bit of information, decides into which category it fits, and places it there. Benefits of this system are that the key element the child should focus on is taught and highlighted, the items are processed one at a time, and the method of “placing” the item in its category can be adapted to be fully accessible for a student. When you read these benefits, can you see why this system is so appealing for students with cognitive delay, autism, or verbal and motor impairments? But don’t be fooled; this simple process is just as valuable for typical learners in high school as it is in the Early Intervention unit!

I was asked step into a troubled primary classroom for students with autism to teach and correct some management issues. Several boys were capable of speech but found it highly aversive or perhaps involving too much processing. When they were asked to tell whether a word began with an /m/ or an /s/ sound, they avoided the task with all sorts of inappropriate behaviors. The only learning going on was the art of dodging the disagreeable! However, when we gave these students cards with pictures showing those same words and asked them to physically sort the cards under headings for the correct beginning sounds, they were compliant and their papers demonstrated how they had grasped this skill. Another totally non-speaking boy previously excluded from group instruction due to his non-compliance was able to perform the activity surprisingly well in group with some fine motor help and a little extra coaching. Best of all, his behavior settled into that of a pleasant group participant each time he was given a clear focus and a tangible way to respond to an activity. No rocket science there! We expanded sorts to math and social skills lessons and these same boys complied beautifully and demonstrated some good learning (well, most of the time).

In the Words Their Way program, word skills progress from general categorization (i.e.: living vs. non-living), to phonemic awareness (awareness of sounds in words), to letter/sound relationships, to simple spelling…all the way up to complex spellings based on Greek or Latin origin. The program begins at Pre-K and goes through 8^th grade or above. I learned more about spelling rules (and exceptions) by reading this textbook than through any coursework I’ve taken. The key is that one skill focus at a time is taught and emphasized as students categorize. By sequencing these skills, typical kids can work their way from the most basic concepts to having stronger spelling skills and vocabularies than many adults. And our kids who aren’t typical learners may be able to progress farther than we expected. As students advance with the concepts, they are asked to make clever discoveries about the items and categories for themselves but, again, the focus of these discoveries is singular.

So, how do sorts work? First we choose a concept, such the sounds of the letter C (soft/hard),  plant life (vascular/nonvascular), quantity (10 or more, less than 10), social behavior (appropriate/inappropriate), suffixes –ible and –able and when to use each, branches of the American government (legislative, judicial, executive) …the list is endless. Obviously, some concepts can or must be broken down into more than just two categories but, for here, for now, let’s keep it simple.

Then we demonstrate how and why items in each category of our concept fit (Soft C words include cent, city, cymbal, cylinder, exception, celery…; Hard C words include cake, cube, cookie, Coke, account, acute, cabbage, cucumber…). We guide children to make discoveries about these categories (C is soft when followed by e, i, or y). We help them evaluate exceptions to the rules if any appear (why do some people pronounce “Celtic” as /kel-tik/?”). We give them practice with more items in the categories. We evaluate their learning by looking at how they categorize the old and new information. We send them off to apply their learning to the world around them.

How can you use this strategy at home and in the classroom? Let’s look at some examples to get you started:

            --basic skills: color recognition, number sense (i.e.: 4 legs-on-a-table, wheels-on-a-
              car, legs-on-a-goat vs. “non-4” wheels-on-a-bicycle, legs-on-a-boy, etc.), shapes…

            --mathematics:  more or less than a given number, odd/even, 
              prime/composites, processes needed to solve word problems
              (i.e.: add/subtract)...

             --reading comprehension: How is the main character like me/
               different from me? What things made Molly happy/sad?

            --science concepts:  Do items float/sink? Are leaves alternate/opposite?

            --social skills:  What things can I do by myself/need the help of others?  
               What behaviors are/aren’t appropriate in certain situations?

The sorts can be as informal as a discussion or separating toys into piles. They can become a bit more formal with the sorting of flashcards. In your word processor, you can make tables and cards for the child to cut apart and glue onto the tables if you want to get even more structured. Experiment this week and get your mind thinking along the line of “sorts.”

Capital and lower case letters



Kindergarten phonemic awareness activity for /m/.
Symbols courtesy of Mayer-Johnson




symbols from Mayer-Johnson



Now let's talk about physical access. This is where I get really excited!  Sorts make visible for adults on the outside of the child's head to see--with our very own eyes--the kinds of thinking that is going on inside. When we look at how a child is grouping, it tells us if he grasps the concepts or hears the sounds internally or whatever other focus we are emphasising, and it helps us pinpoint any gaps in learning.


There are two basic types of responses a child can make when sorting:     
     1) placing the individual items under category headings (involves handling many items)
     2) indicating the category headings an item falls under (involves only as many items as you have categories)

Ideally kids would get to touch and process every item. Manipulating each item helps direct their focus and makes the activity engaging. But we all know kids that can't handle lots of items. Maybe they are super-distractable or maybe they have very limited motor skills. It's much easier to switch-scan between 2-3 headings than 30 individual choices, after all! The type of response best suited to your learners should be considered when determining what kind of access best fits their needs, so that is where we begin our thinking.


Kids who can handle many items might be able to respond by:
      --putting items in labeled boxes
      --writing items under the headings 
      --cutting/pasting a sheet of items 
      --peeling pre-cut, pre-printed items off a backing and adhering under the headings (use commercial computer labels or double-stick tape and a sheet of freezer paper, plastic side up)
      --sliding index cards into vinyl pockets of pocket chart
      --Velcro-ing communication symbols under heading cards on a piece of indoor/outdoor carpet
      --drag-n-dropping items into columns/bins in a computer program*


Kids who need to limit the number of items they handle will indicate category headings where the individual items should be placed. Placement will have to be done by a "scribe," be it a peer, an adult or a computer. One of these methods may work for indicating category headings:
      --pointing (finger, eye gaze, nose, chin...)
      --activating single switches, one for each heading
      --touching a category on a touch screen*
      --2-switch scanning (one to indicate next option--"next", one to select that option--"that one"), which can either dictate to a partner or a computer* 
      --naming categories programmed on an AAC device (either simple or high-tech)

I hope your mind is racing with ways to make sorts a part of your child's or class's learning routine. It really DOES work well. Have fun learning with your kids this week!

Rose-Marie

*I had hoped to include some examples of software programs that can support sorts in this post, but it got far too lengthy. Be sure to tune in again next week, same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel.