When I first picked up the book, Look! Written by Jeff Mack I was immediately intrigued. The book has only two words repeated throughout the entire story, and both of them are words on Joey’s device – Look, and Out.
The premise of the book is simple. A gorilla is trying to get a little boy to look at a book. The gorilla repeats Look! over and over again, but the boy is so engaged in his television that he either ignores the gorilla or gets mad, ordering the gorilla out of the room. Every time the gorilla returns to the room he ups his game to attempt to gain the boy’s attention, just increasing the number of times he says “Look!” Eventually he falls over the boy’s TV, which causes the boy to yell “Look out!” The TV breaks, the gorilla is shunned from the room, and the boy is left with nothing to do but read the left behind books. He becomes excited by a book about a gorilla and a boy, shares the book with the gorilla, and at the end of the book both the gorilla and the boy have filled up on reading and are now “out” (or sleeping). [Read more…]
I was thrilled when my Journal of Early Intervention arrived this week with a study on the impact of sustained adult modeling of Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC) with students with complex communication needs (CCN). I’m always excited to see AAC studies show up in special education journals. As the number of children are given access to AAC increases more studies are looking at how children develop language skills with AAC, and what are the best methods for teaching students to AAC. The more we know, the better we’ll be able to teach, so I quickly flipped open the study and read to see if it could help me in my work with Joey. 
