exemplar activities

Unit 1 Activity 2 - Making books for pupils - Exemplar 3

Classroom setting

I am based on the West Witney Primary School site. I have my own classroom of 11 boys aged between 6 and 8 years and I work with three learning Support Assistants. I do not teach on a Thursday, there is a permanent teacher who takes my class on that day. All of my pupils are fully mobile. They have a wide range of learning difficulties, some of them have speech and communication difficulties and all of them have some degree of language difficulties. All of the pupils have general developmental delay across all areas of the curriculum and some of them display some challenging behaviour. The range of language and literacy skills is wide; there are some pupils who can communicate well verbally and others with very limited speech. Some of the pupils can read limited words and text but most of them rely on the use of symbols for reading and writing.

Why ICT?

In the past I have had to draw by hand any symbols I wanted to use to make communication books and resources. This is incredibly time consuming so with the development of being able to use symbols on the computer, including creating grids containing symbols my time has been saved and the resources look far more professional and can be saved to be edited and reused.

ICT resources

Windows 95 with the Writing With Symbols 2000 program.

ICT skills required to carry out the task

Basic word processing skills. Understanding of how to use the Writing With Symbols program and how to create grids.

Teaching/Learning/Organisation

One particular pupil in my class, Student A, has Cri-Du-Chat Syndrome, he is unable to produce all of the speech sounds, he can link a few sounds together at times e.g. 'me', he can identify quite a range of printed symbols and he uses some sign language but often needs to be encouraged to be more accurate when signing. His comprehension is at a higher level that his expression and he can find it frustrating if he cannot get his meaning across. My Thursday colleague, Student A's parents, the Speech and Language Therapist and myself agreed it would be worth trying a communication book with him. The main objectives of this were to ease his frustration, develop his ability to express himself with familiar and unfamiliar people and to aid his comprehension. At all times he was still to be encouraged to speak and sign as the communication book was to be an addition to his communication not a replacement for the skills he already has and is working on.

I am familiar with the program Writing With Symbols and have used it to produce various resources. I had been shown how to make grids but it was good to use them for a specific purpose and to experiment with the sizing of the cells. I decided to make a grid contain 8 symbols. The class team thought about which areas would be most useful for Student A and it was decided to start with his class, timetable, numbers, days of week and weekend news. At the moment the symbol is dominant in the cell but there is also printed text underneath it. I have used the digital camera to take photographs of all his class peers and the class staff and these have been inserted into 2 grids. My Thursday colleague is working on developing some topic based grids. The completed grids have been printed, mounted on coloured card and laminated; they are all kept in an A5 file. The grids have been colour coded for home, school/timetable, maths and topic at the moment.

We have begun to use his communication book particularly on a Monday morning to help with his weekend news. Student A will now find his home page in the book and point to at least one symbol of something that he has done at the weekend; previously we would have to ask him various questions. There has been one particular occasion when he overheard another pupil talking about a Birthday party and Student A was trying really hard to say something to the adults. His signs were not accurate but when he was given his book he immediately and independently found the page with the other pupil's photo on and then found the page with the party symbol on and was extremely pleased with himself and so were we. Student A is finding his communication book accessible and easy to use.

Evaluation

I am pleased that I chose this activity as it has made me concentrate on Student A's communication skills and get down to actually making his communication book. So far, it is proving to be a success and we intend to develop it further by making sure that we use it more often, it is always accessible and that the grid sheets are developed to match Student A's ability and the work being covered. His parents have also had a positive response to his book and find that he will use it to point to the school timetable symbols and to talk about people at school. We are arranging for them to borrow the digital camera so we can include more grids on family members and home life. The communication book is definitely beginning to develop Student A's skills in expression and comprehension. Looking towards the future this will be a valuable means of communication for him, especially with people who are not familiar with him.

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