Animated Step-by-Steps®: Literacy Expert

Monday, May 15, 2017

Literacy Expert

It’s always fun to have a literacy expert look at your literacy resources and give you concrete suggestions for making them even better. This past week I had the pleasure of ‘hanging with’ Dr. Caroline Musselwhite … literacy expert and an all-round gem to the field of AAC and literacy.

In an earlier version of the ASbyS Mystery Animals, I had filled in some of the letters in the ‘mystery animal words’. Caroline suggested that I omit the letters completely allowing teachers greater flexibility in using the pen tools of their interactive whiteboard to add letters in keeping with the needs of the class or the needs of an individual student in the class. For example, if her students are great at identifying the first letter/sound in a spoken word but are challenged by the task of identifying final sounds in a word, all the letters might be added except the final letter/sound.

I also showed Caroline the B-I-N-G-O and Friends Song that I had created extending the ‘bingo verse’ to other farm animals with names such as W-I-N-N-Y, B-E-S-S-Y, K-I-T-T-Y and she suggested that I could extend that strategy to other sets of words as well. e.g., weather terms (S-U-N-N-Y, C-L-OU-D-Y, R-A-I-N-Y, S-N-O-W-Y, and F-O-G-G-Y, W-I-N-D-Y. Many thanks to the colleague who gave Caroline this original great idea. The final Animated Step-by-Step product is … B-I-N-G-O Weather!