Quest for Learning

The Northern Ireland Curriculum offers a number of materials for teaching and assessing learners with profound or multiple disabilities. Among these are the Quest for Learning assessment materials and inclusive literacy materials. Check them out.

The Learning Program

The Down Syndrome Foundation of Orange County has a free and comprehensive set of learning materials that are appropriate for learners with many different developmental or intellectual working on their Learning Program website.

Included are (you must be logged in to go to most links):

Literacy Materials

• instructional materials
• introductory sight word readers and flashcards (which use photo support and large print for low vision)
• emergent readers and flashcards which support the Lakeshore Learning Readers
  
• abc phonics materials
  

Math Materials

• Introduction to Numbers (numbers, counting, number lines, concepts)
• Addition
• Subtraction
• Money
• Time
  

Daily Activity Guides

Significant and Profound Disabilities:
Many of the materials would be great for students with very significant to profound intellectual disabilities who are not necessarily working on literacy or numeracy per se. The introductory sight word readers make fantastic photo based vocabulary concept books for our learners working on earlier cognitive skills, as do the Count to Ten book and Counting Fruit book; textures or objects could be added for students with low vision.

Web Sites for Teaching Reading

• AAC and Literacy
  
• Building Language for Literacy
• Free Reading
  
• Leading to Reading
• Literacy Center
  
• Literactive
  
• Mighty Book
• Phonics Play
  
• Reading Rockets
  
• Roy the Zebra
• Starfall Reading
  

MEville to WEville Wiki

As many of you know MEville to WEville is a literacy program by AbleNet for elementary aged learners with moderate to significant disabilities, including non-speaking students. I have recently received a copy from (the generous folks at) AbleNet to review and will do so soon, but until then I want to share a resource that was posted on the Boardmaker ListServ.

The MEville WikiSpace shares tabs for your spiral bound MEville to WEville teacher guides, biligual parents letters, Boardmaker boards (in boardmaker format, so you can adapt them), alignment to Florida Standards, data collection forms (based on standards), internet links and a blog.

Here is a MEville to WEville FAQ is you want to know more about the program.

Beyond a Voice AAC and Literacy

As I always tell parents, our students cannot communicate their own original thoughts unless they either use a language compaction program like Unity/Minspeak (which, in my personal experience, can be limiting to literacy) or unless they can read and spell.

Reading and spelling has so many other benefits, as well as being a basic human right, that it is often the way to go. If you work with people of any age who use AAC to communicate you should check out the webcast about AAC and literacy at AAC-Rerc. It is never too late to learn to read.

• Full Webcast
• Slides as PDF
• Webcast Transcript as PDF
• AAC-RERC Website
  

Many of you know PRC has been doing major work with literacy lately, now one of their competitors, Dynavox, has announced it will follow suit. The following new information was announced on Lon's podcast No Limit's to Learning "A.L.L (Accessible Language Learning) - A literacy program coming this fall (September 08) from Mayer-Johnson/Dynavox. Includes phonemic awareness, sound segmentation, etc. Provides guided and independent practice. Can be accessed on a Dynavox device, on Boardmaker plus or stand alone on a computer. The system compliments reading curriculums already in place as a supplement.

Web Site of the Day: The Every Day Life Project

This link brought to you by reader Jeannie from Lesley College and Seem Collaborative in Massachusetts.

The Every Day Life Project is a free, membership required, website designed to teach learners how to do life skills tasks in a failure free environment. Other parts of the website have lessons on math and money, computers and online literacy classes. Though not intended for intesive special needs many of the materials are appropriate or adaptable. It is about life skills, literacy and success. Here is what their web site says:

What is the Everyday Life Project?

The Everyday Life project uses interactive, situation-based lessons to teach functional literacy skills. This new approach to learning allows learners to apply their basic literacy skills to real-world situations so they can gain the confidence and skills to be successful.

Why Teach Functional Literacy?

The lack of literacy in the United States is a very real problem. 22% of people tested in the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) scored at the Basic level in document literacy, representing 44 million Americans that do not know how to apply their basic literacy skills to everyday life.

Individuals at the Basic level can read the texts they encounter; however, they may struggle to integrate and synthesize information, and perform quantitative tasks with multiple steps.

Our goal is to help these 44 million people reach the Intermediate level and obtain the skills they need to succeed.

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Route 66 Reading

At the 2002 TASH Conference I attended a workshop on literacy and the learner with multiple special needs. Presented by individuals from the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, the information was grim, literacy rates were very low and very few people had any idea if and how to teach reading to these learners. Also, if these students did not show some ability to read by age twelve reading instruction was discontinued. The presenters were working on creating web based software that could use the internet and assistive technology to teach both students to read and their teachers to better teach reading.

Apparently this dream finally became a reality at the 2006 Closing the Gap Conference when Route 66 was presented. Route 66 is, "a comprehensive set of literacy content and instructional tools and services for adolescent and adult learners delivered via the Internet. It combines a balanced set of reading, writing and word study at the first and second grade level... ."

The Route 66 is automatically accessible with screen readers, braille displays, switch use, alternative input devices and a variety of other assistive technologies. It is web based, thus it lowers to price of a software purchase (no packaging or inventory control) and does not require any additional hardware beyond the internet connection and whatever assistive tech the student already uses.

There is currently a free demo for students and teacher to try out, which sounds like a great first step (login:initialteacher, password:password).