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Promoting Achievement through Technology and INstruction for all Students
Apr
20

Spring Samaras

One of my favorite days on our farm is April 20. August 3 is also pretty good and June 8 is so lovely, but  April 20 is on average when all of last year’s dead plant material that we’ve left in the rows for the insects and microbes to live on over the winter has blown away.  

sedum emerging from the ground with dead stalks still attached
Surging upward into the warmth, the green perennial shoots are shoving aside the gray of Indiana March. It’s also the day that the silver maple trees are a shimmery yellow green color as they develop their helicopter-like seed pods and tiny leaves. In just a week, they’ll shift to their summer darker green color, but for now they are luminescent chartreuse, especially spectacular when viewed at a distance–lanterns of the woods against a blue stormcloud background. 

April 20th is also around when I’m hearing wonderful end of school year success stories from Indiana Blind and Low Vision teachers when we meet in our Professional Learning Community Sessions. The stories are often ones where general education teachers have met the challenge of having a student with blindness or low vision for the first time. Nervously, they claimed in August, “I’ve never had a student with blindness before.” A veteran teacher, Rhonda, told me she replies, “don't worry, most teachers haven't. Students like this one come along once every ten or twenty years. You are lucky!” 



Another BLV Teacher, Alison shared that in August, a high school English teacher, finding out that she will be working with a student using braille for literacy, claims that there is no way she can teach her reading method “OPTIC” to a student who can’t access visuals. Fast forward to a magical day in spring. She, the BLV teacher, and the student met and developed a way to turn the elements of OPTIC into auditory elements and the student related her reading assignments to musical pieces. Multisensory means of representation for the win! 

Alison also told a story about how a math teacher, also unsure about having a student with low vision, began to display his visual geometric examples under his student’s magnifier and invited the class to view along. It provided a form of engagement that he’d never thought of before and declared around April 20th that, “having this student has made me a better teacher.” 

Apr 20, 2023 is also the date for this year’s PATINS Tech Expo. Seeing your faces and hearing more of your stories in person will be the spring tonic to rejuvenate us all. 

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Apr
05

Wet Poop: An AAC Story

Wet Poop: And AAC Story The future cannot be any brighter for a student when they have a team of adults who are willing to try new things and really listen to the student in all the ways they tell you something.

Content warning: this blog contains toilet humor, bodily function discussion, and the power and potential of every child.

It’s not too early to call, but my favorite story of the semester came from an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) workshop I did in February. We were learning about all the greatest hits in AAC: modeling without expectation, ways to support literacy and comprehension, and being good communication partners. Someone always has a story to share, that day was:

“One of my students told us with his AAC device he had ‘wet poop!’”

The entire room gasped in appreciation. I love these AAC workshops. It’s phenomenal to be in a room of people who get it. None of us get that warm, enthusiastic reception over dinner at home when we talk about bathroom things.

For those of you who are a little lost, let’s paint the picture, which is an increasingly common one:

This is a student who was introduced to a robust way to communicate this year after years of having very little access, just a few words in a limited way. This is a child who never had a way to make a choice that wasn’t already curated for him by adults who couldn’t possibly anticipate all his wants and needs. This is a child who someone might have described as having a “behavior problem” when he was just using whatever he could in absence of communication access.

“Wet poop” wasn’t a term he’d heard anyone use before. He didn’t know how to find the word “diarrhea” and wasn’t sure how to spell it. Because he knew what was going on with his body and could describe it, he was able to get prompt health care. This is easily one of the biggest concerns parents have in consultations with PATINS.

“When they cry, I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t know if they’re hurt or sick or sad, they can’t tell me and the doctor doesn’t believe me. I’d give anything for them to just tell me what’s wrong.”

His team knew that despite giving him an excellent robust tool for language there was more to be done. I had the pleasure of sitting down with the team recently to review all the great things they’d done thus far and what to plan for next:

  1. They introduced core and fringe words, and now plan to focus on grammar and syntax to create interesting and meaningful messages
  2. They introduced the alphabet, phonics, and literacy instruction and planned to introduce word prediction to support spelling and communication strategies
  3. They had great visual and language supports for literacy and planned to tweak their presentation to promote engagement.

The future cannot be any brighter for a student when they have a team of adults who are willing to try new things and really listen to the student in all the ways they tell you something.

If you have your own “wet poop” moment, fart sound you want to program into an AAC tool, or need a new idea to try, we’re here to help!

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Jan
05

Book It! For Grown-Ups

Book It! For Grown-Ups Were you part of the generation that grew up learning the value of reading as it related to a personal pan pizza? Me too!

Were you part of the generation that grew up learning the value of reading as it related to a personal pan pizza?

Me too!

Pizza Hut’s Book It! program was a cornerstone of my childhood: read so many books a month, and get a little coupon for a free pizza. In elementary school, I devoured books almost as fast as pizza. Throughout my childhood and teens, I always had a stack of novels nearby.

It didn't change until sometime in my 20s. I couldn’t find any enjoyment in reading books and at the time I couldn't pinpoint why. My free time, interests, and access to books had certainly changed. I had a job, responsibilities, and no weekly trip to the library built into my schedule. I just didn't read books anymore, so I described myself as "not much of a reader."

In actuality I was still a reader, a voracious one even. I was just reading different things for different purposes: cooking and travel blogs, news reports, professional journals, comic strips, and the Wikipedia pages on Basque whaling in the 1700s. I spent hours reading every day but if it wasn’t a book with chapters I believed it didn’t count. That frame of mind was harmful: no one way of reading or type of reading is superior to another. When we put books and novels as superior to other types of reading, we set ourselves up to an unequal and inaccessible standard. And when I took the pressure off of being “a good reader = books = pizza” and could find enjoyment in more types of reading.

So I propose a new Book It, A Grown Up Reading Program. There are a few rules:

All reading counts

Books of any length or genre? Good. Children's books? Good. Not-a-books like blogs, comic strips, technical reports, the news, and recipes? All good. Audio, digital text, print? Good, good, good!

Get the tools to help you read

Today I almost exclusively read digital materials. Audiobooks let me multitask, conserve energy, and prevent repetitive motion injuries while the digital text gives me the learning and organization tools I need. Both of these formats are necessary for me to access reading. I also use two types of headphones for audiobooks: bone conduction and noise canceling. You can borrow these types of headphones from our lending library. If I was a student with an IEP, I would insist all this information be written in that document under assistive technology and accessible educational materials.

Did you notice up at the top right corner of the screen we have a ReachDeck accessibility toolbar? If you haven’t yet, try it out. Listen to this blog or another page with the tool. Do some stretches or pace around a bit and read. Did you like it? Would you or your students use something like that again?

Share the joy

Does every student have access to reading materials in your district at the exact same moment as everyone else? 

Do they all get to have interesting reading experiences about a variety of topics? 

Do they need some tools to be successful readers, as most adults do?

If you need support with the above questions, reach out to us, we have tools and ideas to try!

Finally, buy yourself a pizza

Also, splurge on some breadsticks, because you are a grown-up with grown-up money.

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Mar
17

For the Love of Reading

Image of Library with books on bookselves and text: For the the Love of Reading by Amanda Crecelius
QR Code to audio For the Love of Reading Read by Author
Artist Name - For-the-Love-of-Reading-Audio.mp3


For the love of reading 
By Amanda Crecelius

I love reading. I love reading for pleasure, for current news updates, for educational purposes, for self-improvement, and tips and tricks. I love reading with my eyes and with my ears. I L-O-V-E reading. I often have a stack of books by my bedside that I have started to read, some in the living room, and at least one in my daughter’s swim class backpack. My Audible account has around 30 books on my wishlist waiting, not so patiently, for my next credit. My top two genres are Historical Fiction and Psychology. Sometimes, I read both at the same time. As my eyes move over the letters on the page or my ears tune into the tone of the reader, my mind chain links the information to various parts in my memory, my knowledge, and my experiences and it is close to euphoric. There is nothing equally as satisfying yet saddening than finishing a good book. As I look around my world, I see fellow lovers of reading and others who have little or no interest in reading at all and this baffles me. This mystery has been slowly deciphered as PATINS’ staff work our way through the LETRS curriculum, along with several social media groups and podcasts dedicated to the science of reading. Through each I am reminded that our brains have not evolved to naturally develop reading like our brains pick up the spoken language. According to the US Department of Education, most children aren’t reading until the age of seven. While speech development can be heard in the babbles of babies shortly after birth according to The Journal of Child Language

I have blocked out my own reading preparation and the challenges that I faced in a curriculum of guessing and memorization. I forget that I myself struggled with reading early on and that I still have a mini panic attack when I need to read out loud (also when I read aloud for blog recordings). Those panicked moments bring flashbacks to sentence counting, so that I could practice the words that I would be called upon to stumble over in front of a class full of excellent readers. Every now and then I come across a word that I do not recognize and I stop, pronounce each letter, and my usual response is “huh, so that’s how you spell that.” Since working at PATINS these personal experiences and the knowledge that I have gained through professional development, including the LETRS training, have enriched consultations and webinars. One of those sessions is coming up on March 30th as we discuss the overlapping literacy strategies used for English Language Learners and students with Specific Learning Disabilities.
 
Over the past few months my daughter, who is nearing the end of kindergarten, has been going through this learning process. And although she is learning through methods fueled by the science of reading, she still has to force her mind to practice and focus on rewiring itself for comprehension of the letters on the page. Frustrations can result in books flying through the air or a stalemate when it is time for bedtime reading or doing homework. 

So how did I develop the love of reading that I have now? I remember my mother sitting with a book in her hand at the kitchen table, on the sofa, in the car, at my volleyball practice, and basically any free second in her day. She read book after book, sometimes not able to put them down until she was finished. I was drawn into her passion for reading. And she filled our lives with exposure to books. She took my siblings and I to our small local library to listen to storytime and let us pick out books to take home for her to read to us. As she read the books she replicated an imagined voice of the characters, showing excited energy for each word on the page. She took us to “The Big Library” which was a two story building in New Albany, IN. For a small town girl, this library was gigantic. She let us wander around freely choosing books and playing throughout the stacks and shelves, as she worked on research. I remember checking out materials that sparked my interest from “The Babysitters Club” to the latest issue of “Seventeen” magazine, even learning Spanish via cassette tapes. Being able to obtain information in a variety of different formats opened the door to the travels, tales, and tips that made me keep coming back.  

Valuable strategies to help students with developing reading skills, include phonemic My daughter sitting on a bench with legs crossed, holding a book in front of a wooden wall that looks like a bookshelf with books on it.awareness, vocabulary building, and comprehension. These strategies build the ability to read but do not necessarily create a love of reading. A love of reading is held in examples of others reading with their eyes and ears, of others sharing their reading experiences, of connecting stories and information to student’s interests, and allowing them to choose from and float around in the sea of reading options in the different formats including read-to-me, audio, parent/teacher/peer read alouds, ebooks, captions on videos, and physical books in large, small, and braille print.

Although I value my daughter’s development of reading skills, I also want her to love to read. So tonight as the stack of Bob books (a series of simple phonetic stories that we use for practicing reading) sit at my daughter’s bedside, I ignore them and the urge for me to rush her brain to learn all the strategies of reading. Instead, I let her dash excitedly to her bookshelf to find her favorite adventure for the evening. As I prep my character voices, we cuddle up and turn the pages to take us away to a castle or a pirate ship and I watch my daughter’s eyes light up with love.

Sources:

Oller, D. K., Wieman, L. A., Doyle, W. J., & Ross, C. (2008, September 26). Infant babbling and speech*: Journal of Child Language. Cambridge Core. 

Typical language accomplishments for children, birth to age 6 -- helping your child become a reader. (2005, December 15).


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May
20

Summer Activities!

Summer is almost here, and I’m excited to share some outdoor time with my cousin who will be in 9th grade in the Fall. I work with him during the school year, helping out with his homework and studying for quizzes and tests. We work especially hard on Math, and he has shown tremendous growth and I want to keep it going. So I have been looking for ways to incorporate Math into the activities he enjoys. Here are a few ideas I have come up with so far:

  1. Having him pay with cash when we go somewhere, and then checking to see if he receives the correct change.
  2. Letting him help with navigation to the places we go. Which direction are we going? How many gallons of gas do we need?
  3. He enjoys baseball, and there are many statistics that we can talk about and how they are figured.
  4. Cooking may not be his favorite activity, but occasionally I can get him to help out. We talk about measurements and conversions. When we have cookouts, he gets to figure out how many hotdogs, hamburgers, etc. we need for everyone.
  5. When we go shopping for shoes or something he truly wants, we get the opportunity to compare prices and to figure out how much 20% off saves us.
  6. I am hoping to build a project with him, and we can use the tape measure and figure out the amount of materials we will need.
  7. I take him out to eat, and I have him look at the calories we will consume. He can also help me figure out the tip.
  8. We play board games like Monopoly, and this includes money skills and budgeting. Battleship helps with graphing and logical reasoning. Connect 4, Clue, Chess, and Checkers help with planning strategy. Yahtzee and Rummikub are fun ways to work on math skills as well.
  9. He spends much of his time playing video games, so I encourage him to play games that involve strategy and planning.

I also encourage him to read all year long, but especially in the summer. I must admit, this has undoubtedly been a challenge! These are some ideas that I have used, or that I am planning to use over the summer.

  1. I take him to the library. I can’t always get him to read while we are there, but they always have a puzzle out so we work on it, and I encourage him to find something to check out.
  2. I am also going to encourage him to listen to audiobooks over the summer to see if he would enjoy them.
  3. I buy him used comic books which he seems to genuinely enjoy. They are inexpensive, and he will usually read them. I try to ask lots of questions about them when he has finished, so we can work on comprehension.
  4. When we build our project, I will have him read any written directions that we come across. 
  5. I will also take any chance I get to have him read in any activity that we do. He can read directions when we are playing games, and he can read recipes or the grocery list when we go to the store.

These are just a few ideas that I have come up with. There are many other ideas, activities, and a wealth of information available with a search on the Internet. What ideas do you use with your students or children that you have found to be successful? Please share with me via the comments section.

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May
13

"...regardless of the content we teach, we are all reading instructors."*

Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 217, a.k.a. Indiana's Dyslexia Law provides a strong backbone to reading instruction for Indiana schools. For instance, this bill provides that:

  • screening for dyslexia is to occur at grades K, 1, 2, 3 and after that as necessary, as instructed in the bill 
  • Schools are to use the Response to Intervention (RTI) tiers before identifying the reading deficit as dyslexia
  • Educators are to use an instructional approach that is explicit, direct, systematic, multisensory and phonetic
  • Every Indiana school corporation is to employ at least one (1) Reading Specialist trained for teaching students with dyslexia
Since we know from 100 years of research that 1 in 5 students have dyslexia, the one lone Reading Specialist is going to be very, very busy, particularly in very large districts. How can this be expected? What is the solution to this very tall, broad, and heavy order?

Teachers in all content areas must help fill gaps by embedding literacy in their instruction. Our students are not just learning to read, but learning to learn. All subject content areas require and will naturally accommodate literacy. Following are some thoughts on weaving intentional literacy into your content classes.

Since a textbook is not the only tool, a classroom library built around your content area can be a wonderful addition to learning. Think puzzles, games, models, art supplies, as well as books and worksheets. Math was always my worst subject. Every year I disliked the drab-looking textbook, the formidable-sounding units of study: Fractions. Multiplication. Division. I know I would have benefitted from The Grapes of Math by Greg Tang. Math strategies presented in rhyme? Yes, Please. 

But reading is not just about paper books. Plan to use as much technology as is appropriate and possible. PATINS Specialists can suggest, explain and demonstrate if you need help.

  • Ear-reading is an authentic reading experience. So is using closed captions while watching tv and online programs. Encourage every interaction with print to be what it is: time spent reading.
  • Provide extra everything: Space, time, patience.
  • Provide information verbally and visually, find multisensory methods for learning.
  • Grade on content, not on spelling or neatness. Don't use a red pen to grade papers, don't have students trade papers to grade in class.
  • Instead of returning assignments during class; use homework folders or another more discreet method.
  • Provide class notes, and/or announce that you are about to tell or show something important.
  • Allow keyboarding as well as handwritten assignments, not one or the other.
  • Ask for help to decipher written work, privately.
  • Identify strengths and call attention to those, not to deficits.
  • Some students will not require a structured, systematic approach to reading, or to learning algebra. It certainly will not be harmful and may enhance learning for them as well. If they don't need extra supports, they'll move on.
  • If a student shows 3 or more of these warning signs in your class, talk to the reading specialist, other teachers, principal, related service providers, parents and the student.
  • Relationships are the glue of instruction. Model and require acceptance, helpfulness, kindness, respect. This last point will make anyone's journey more rewarding and much easier.
Learn about helping students with dyslexia: 

Yale Center   International Dyslexia Association

Thanks so much!



* title quote: Rebecca Alber

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May
14

Self-Discovery in a Reading Journal

I was talking with my friend Susan last weekend, concerning the coronavirus, social distancing, isolation. It was a fairly somber catch-up between friends whose history began when we were in 1st grade. She and I wondered what we would have done, as children, had we been ordered to socially distance? What if I had been forced by a global pandemic to stay home daily with my parents and 4 older siblings? Or Susan, with her parents and “irritating” younger brother? How would we have survived a prolonged period of not going to school, back to back with an approaching summer without our friends?

A Little Backstory:

Several of my best friends, including Susan, lived in town, a very small town where there was an all-boys military school and a soda shop. I grew up on a farm, where we had horses to ride. On many a Saturday, 2 or 3 or 4 of us would head out on horseback, with our school lunch boxes stuffed with snacks. We would ride the hillsides well into the afternoon, crossing creeks and other farms. Our only responsibility: close any gates we opened.

So no matter who went to whose house, there was fun. Adventure. Freedom. From the watchful eyes of parents, from random shootings, freedom from cyber-bullying, and human trafficking. There are so many social ills that children learn to accept and navigate now, that we never knew. The world was not perfect, but we were fairly removed from social traumas, on the streets of our little town, or riding horses over the rolling hills of Bourbon County, Kentucky. 

As we grew into our early teens, Susan and I liked to go off by ourselves and read books, often poetry, then talk about how what we read fit our lives. We couldn’t tell other friends about this, because it seemed a little weird. Our favorite poet was Rod McKuen-our balm for so much adolescent angst. We listened to the Beatles and read Rod McKuen. Children of the ’60s. 

I wish that we would have had the forethought to write down all the books we read, from childhood ‘til now. I hadn’t thought about Rod McKuen for years; I googled some poems and was taken back to those melancholy years, long conversations with my friend, savoring how we turned to poetry and music during times of trouble. It wasn’t a bad coping method. I am not wrong. Let it be.

So here is a challenge (I know, you need another one, right?) for teachers and/or parents and/or anyone who would like to promote literacy, and to help students see the value in reading, and thinking about reading: encourage your students to keep a Reading Journal.

Framework for a simple Reading Journal

1. Help the student make a list of books they would like to read. Go on Amazon and search books by reading level and write down titles and authors of interest. Or go to the public library if it’s open, and browse. Many libraries now use a service such as Overdrive, if he or she prefers accessible formats.


2. Ask the student to write down their reading goals. For instance, maybe she would like to learn all she can about NASA and the history of the civilian space program. Or he’d like to read books written by Louis Sachar because he loved the Wayside School stories. Perhaps the goal is competitive: to read more books than brother or sister. They could note the begin and end dates, to add to their sense of accomplishment. There is no wrong or right here. They could even skip the goals and just keep a reading log Someone might need to help the little ones do the actual reading and writing, but what a great habit to start! 

3. After each book is completed, have the student write their impressions. This might be a paragraph or a page or several. If a little one tells you about a book that you’ve read to or with them, be sure to record it in their journal, verbatim. Did they like the book?  Why or why not? Which character was their favorite? Some might rather just rate the books with 1 to 5 stars. Then, try to help them articulate their reasoning for the number of stars.

4. The Reading journal belongs to the one reading the books, and they might personalize it with drawings or pictures or collages. I looked at some journals that had been indexed, and many are quite artistic and elaborate. Start simply and the creativity will make its way, the journal will evolve. One who struggles with reading and writing might flourish with audiobooks or text-to-speech, and a nice set of colored pencils.

Keeping a Reading Journal would provide a natural path to the practice of writing and reflecting, and building retention of what is read. It would be a wonderful personal history, a tremendous treasure. A perfect method for Continued Learning.

And now, a few words by a poet from my past to sum up the present:

“You have to make the good times yourself
take the little times and make them into big times

and save the times that are all right
for the ones that aren’t so good.”

-Rod McKuen, Listen to the Warm

Thanks so much!

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