One of my favorite things to do is plan speech and language lessons with literacy. You can build in a craft for requesting, naming, and counting and/or use visuals to work on sequencing, grammar, and answering WH questions. My main reason for including a craft is to promote carryover conversation about it at home. It's been my experience that kids of all ages and ability levels have the best attention when a book is interactive.
Teachers pay Teachers (TpT) has been a game changer with a plethora of sellers using their creative juices to produce book companions that are just a few clicks away. I also cherish my Custom Boards app by Smarty Ears apps as I can quickly create visuals using Smarty symbols or my own images to use with my favorite storybooks. Honestly, I don't know how I survived before I got my hands on this app!! You can even vary the sizes of images now, so I enlarged a giant pancake and meatballs for my Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs bin and the kids really enjoyed it.
With my older students, I use thought bubble shaped sticky notes with reading comprehension questions right on the page so I can be sure to target multiple goals.
Recently, I have stepped up my modeling on Speech Generating Devices (SGD) during story readings and guess what?! The kids are catching on to it!! I have several SGD users navigating effortlessly to COMMENT, maintain topics, and answer simple questions. It's been so much fun! Sometimes, I open You Tube and play a book on my iPad, while other times, I use a book from my collection. Either way, I recommend using one or the other to simplify modeling with the SGD. Some of my favorites for this simple interaction have been the series from Pete the Cat by Eric Litwin and Elephant and Piggie by Mo Willems. During my back to school lesson plans, clients found items seen in school on their devices while listening to: If You Take a Mouse to School by Felicia Bond. Now it really feels like clients are attending to these stories as opposed to trying to hurriedly flip pages because they are jointly attending.
Pete the Cat Video
Let's Go for a Drive Video
So you may be asking, how is this commenting? Aren't they answering questions and memorizing paths? GREAT question!! I believe that I'm shaping commenting by solidifying client's expressions. For example, when one little guy finds the color of Pete's shoes on his device, I respond with, "Yes! His shoes are brown now!" I also love using social responses like, "Uh Oh", "Oh no!" and "Great!" to make a comment during book readings. For the most part, I have been able to fade my modeling with many of my clients after just a couple sessions. Recently, a caregiver reported that her daughter started commenting when she sought out mom to say fish after watching something on You Tube about fish. We all celebrate these moments when a child with autism seeks out another person to share and thereby demonstrate joint attention about a topic. It's easy to see that clients feel proud of these accomplishments, so I end some of my work tasks by modeling this proud emotion on devices too.
