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!



Thank you Dr. Musselwhite, for all your creative ideas and for everything that you do for our field!

…’til the next post …  (new posts every Monday)

Visit my website   http://animatedstep-by-steps.com
Follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/@AnimStepbySteps
Follow me on facebook www.facebook.com/AnimatedStepBySteps
Email me canadiangoosse@gmail.com

©2017 Carol Goossens’, Ph.D.
Augmentative Communication Consultant
Speech-Language Pathologist
Special Educator


Thursday, May 11, 2017

500 Products!

I’ve finally reached the milestone of 500 products in the Bloom Where You are Planted Store on the Teachers Pay Teachers Site. Whew!

As the number of products increase, it has become more challenging to track down a particular title, so I would like to remind you of three options at your disposal.
  1. Search store:  If you know the name of the ASbyS resource this is the easiest way to track down a title 
  2. Custom Categories: This option is great if you are looking for a specific category such as a Recipes or resources that use SymbolStix or Bundled options that provide a substantial savings. 
  3. Sort by: This option is helpful if you are interested in looking at Best Seller or Most Recent options.







Animated Step-by-Steps are animated PowerPoints designed to address literacy, language, AAC and a host of academic goals. Each page includes a series of animations. Read the text up to the star … click … and see an animation of what you just read. 

Hope you can spare a few minutes to check out these engaging resources. 

Use the button in the upper right to navigate to the TpT store. 


…’til the next post …  (new posts every Monday)

Visit my website   http://animatedstep-by-steps.com
Follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/@AnimStepbySteps
Follow me on facebook www.facebook.com/AnimatedStepBySteps
Email me canadiangoosse@gmail.com