exemplar activities

Unit 6 Activity 6 - Accessible displays - Exemplar 2

The class consists of six boys, aged between 8 and 11, who have severe learning difficulties. Pupils communicate mainly using single words, signs, or symbols, often prompted by an adult. One pupil in the class communicates using clear speech. There is one teacher and two learning support assistants.

In literacy the class are reading 'Bears In the Night' by Stan and Jan Berenstain. The whole class literacy objectives include:

To show an understanding of the grammatical content of a story in relation to simple nouns and prepositions such as 'in', 'on', 'under', 'over'
To use pictures and symbols to convey meaning
To develop turn-taking and concentration
To developing listening skills and responding
To use a BIGmack to join in telling a familiar story at the appropriate time

The story was told to the whole class using an interactive display, aiding pupils' understanding by use of the visual props. I generated the symbols, telling each phrase of the story using 'Writing With Symbols 2000' and placed them under the appropriate part of the display.

Speech output switches were also incorporated into the lesson to encourage pupils to really look and interact with the display. I decided to use two BIGmacks, each with a different phrase of the story recorded as a single message. I velcroed the appropriate symbol message e.g. 'under the bridge' to the top. The aim was that the switches would aid pupils without speech to join in the story in a group situation.

The pupils were then split up into small groups or one to one work to complete 'action and place' tasks from the story. The switches were further used as a fun way for pupils to show their understanding of the position of the bear on the display and assess their ability to recognise and discriminate between symbols. Pupils were also involved in matching Rebus symbols to the position of the bear in the display or to a picture in the storybook. Some pupils completed sentence work by filling in the missing word 'e.g. The bear is ___the bridge' with the appropriate symbol card.

The pupils used the switches to varying degrees. One pupil was able to press the switch to evoke a message but needed physical prompting to press the correct switch at the correct time in the story. Another pupil (with no recognisable speech himself) found the switches a really motivating way to do his symbol recognition tasks, because his choice of symbol was reinforced with the speech output. By the end of the lesson he was able to press the correct switch to correspond with the position of the bear on the display. Another huge success was made by a pupil who currently only communicates using single words. He was consistently able to press the correct switch to join in telling the correct phrase of the story. He really enjoyed doing so and listened to the story intently waiting for his cue to choose a switch. To make sure pupils were recognising the symbols and had not just learnt the colour of the switches I swapped the velcroed symbol and ask my LSA to record the corresponding new message.

The use of ICT with the display certainly helped to involve the pupils. The pupils were encouraged to look at the display in order to ensure that they chose the correct switch to join in with the story. The use of switches had to be carefully managed. Some pupils found switches impossible to share; therefore they worked best in small group or one to one situation.

In retrospect it would have been good to introduce the use of speech output devices in a lesson prior to the one outlined above. Using a message sequence device pupils could have taken turns to press the switch to play the story in recorded parts themselves. This would enable pupils to be in control of telling the whole story themselves and being further rewarded by the adult acting out their message with the bear on the display.

In the future, some pupils would benefit from more challenging tasks using e.g. a 'Go Talk' box to test their discrimination between increased choices of symbols, words and phrases.

Unfortunately we don't have a Step-by-Step or Go-Talk box available in school…….yet!

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