I am participating in an online book study with over 800 professionals interested in teaching comprehensive literacy to students with significant disabilities and complex communication needs. That is essentially the book title. Find it here. It might sound familiar to my blog readers. The book was written by the same professors, Drs. Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver, who conducted the training on literacy instruction that I went to last spring. The new publication and study is an amazing follow up to the seminar. I am trying to implement the strategies; I am the student as I learn to provide the best education possible to our son, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel is seven years old and has complex communication needs due to a laryngectomy. He uses a high tech communication device, the app Speak for Yourself, on an iPad. There is vulnerability in opening my homeschool room to the world. But yet I invite you to walk alongside me as I teach him. If you are ahead of me on this journey, please reach back and pull me along with suggestions and ideas for improvement. If you are newer than I am to teaching a child with a complex communication needs or significant disabilities how to read and write, then I hope this look into my classroom is the hand back and example you need to keep on keeping on.

I try to offer Nathaniel five different opportunities for literacy learning each day: shared reading, alphabet knowledge, shared writing, independent writing, and independent reading. This post is a peek into some of the literacy moments we had this week.

Shared Reading/Reading Comprehension:
I structure our learning at home each week on a picture book. We read it in the morning and often again after lunch. At week’s end, the book is added to a stack by Nathaniel’s bed for evening reading. A book will often stay on that bookshelf for weeks, meaning Nathaniel might hear the story fifteen to twenty times before it is replaced by new titles cycling through our shelves. Our focus picture book for school this week was The Love Letter by Anika Aldamuy Denise.

Nathaniel has strong receptive language skills and comprehension skills. My practice when reading aloud to Nathaniel is an odd merge of emergent and conventional strategies seasoned heavily by my thirty year experience of reading to my children.

I asked a question each morning before reading our book. If you are familiar with the aspects of conventional literacy instruction, you might immediately think of anchor-read-apply charts. We are doing that - sort of. Well, no. Maybe not quite. Because I’m really bad about anchoring the question. But writing about our books gives us more opportunity to work with print. I write a question as Nathaniel watches. We talk about possible answers. We look at the cover or through the book at pictures for clues to the answer. We remember what we read yesterday. We read. We write more answers to our writing after reading. I’m currently focusing on ideas like characters in a story, sequencing story events, and how characters feel or change over the book. Sometimes I offer Nathaniel pictures to select from to answer the question if the words he might need aren’t familiar on his AAC device, but I didn’t need to do that this week.

We also do the typical emergent shared reading strategy of “Put the CROWD in the CAR” with a number of books each day. I learned the phrase this last year, but it feels much like how I have read aloud to my children for decades. A book we enjoyed this week that offered Nathaniel some fun completion opportunities using his AAC device was A Bear Sat On My Porch Today by Jane Yolan. We have recently been learning about bears; this title was a lighthearted fun read.

In the story The Love Letter, Bunny’s mom asks him to help peel parsnips. We took time this week to read a recipe for roasted parsnips. Today we will make them. Activities that tie into the story like this increase Nathaniel’s interest and show him reading is something we use in every part of life.

Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge Instruction:
After our story reading, we move into our Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge Instruction lesson. We do a letter of the day, not a letter of the week. I follow the guidelines pretty closely; we are in our fourth cycle for the year. Each day we found the letters in the alphabet book we are using this cycle and our various chart writing. We wrote the letters in sand and with markers on paper.

We are working on matching upper and lower case letters using a variety of games. We review their sounds and names as we work. We are working daily on finding pairs of words that rhyme. Both of these activities will continue to build Nathaniel’s alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness.

Since Valentine’s Day is approaching and the letter X was one of our letters this week, I picked up some XO sprinkles. It is age appropriate to share with Nathaniel that an X represents a kiss and an O represents a hug. We will use these on ice cream and other desserts as another way to embed our alphabet learning.

Shared Writing:
Our predictable chart writing this week about about a recent trip to the zoo. Nathaniel wanted to supply the answers to all the sentences; I hardly got to contribute. I did throw in the word squirrel so we could find a Q in our chart. We follow the typical weekly layout for how to work with predictable chart writing. Since Nathaniel wrote pretty much the whole chart by himself, we each selected a sentence and put a sticker on it to indicate we wanted to use that sentence when we apart the words. We will make our book on Friday using pictures from our trip and the internet.

Independent Writing:
The Love Letter offers an incredible message about the power of writing. Hedgehog, Bunny, and Squirrel each find a letter. It’s the same letter actually. Each character finds it and then subsequently loses it. But when in their possession, the letter significantly influences each character. It makes them feel loved. It changes their behaviors. Writing can have such an amazing impact. I wanted to bring this concept alive for Nathaniel by writing and receive letters as a family.

I set up a letter writing station. We made mailboxes. Convenient timing to Valentine boxes being sold at the craft store! We wrote letters to each other each day. I noticed immediate changes in Nathaniel’s writing because of the letters he received from us.

On Monday he simply sealed his cards closed with stickers. No letter stamps or letter stickers. No interest in writing with a marker or crayon. However, after receiving two letters, he transtioned to writing a message with a pen on the inside of the card and imitating my letter stamped word LOVE on the outside of the card by writing the word LOVE. His writing inside his card shows that understands every sentence needs to end with a period. We usually use a key board as an alternative pencil for his writing activities. I can actually make out an L, O, and E in his card! The lines for V are there; they are parallel. Good job, kiddo! Rich spent time at the writing station in the evenings filling our mailboxes. Rich and I use the Dolch Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten sight words in our letters to Nathaniel to add another layer of his literacy learning.

Note: The stickers offer a bit of incentive to write. We will not use glue or glitter or other embellishments for our letter writing. Just the stickers. I want the focus to be on letters, words and conventions of writing.

Independent Reading:
Pausing to have some independent book time is a given in our day. I used to all it SQUIRT - Super Quiet UnInterrupted Rest/Reading Time. It was my sanity hour when homeschooling Nathaniel’s older siblings. I still cherish the break and moment to curl up at the end of the couch with a cuddly blanket and book. Nathaniel, on the other hand, prefers different seating options. :)

We end our independent reading time by reading books made from our predictable charts or that I have printed from Tar Heel Reader. I encourage Nathaniel to read in his head as I read aloud.

That’s a smattering of our literacy learning this week! Did you see something that you might want to implement? Or an area I might improve instruction? Please share below in the comments!