“Turkey ready pool love” Joey said as we read Red Hat, Blue Hat by Sandra Boynton. Sure enough, on the next page, the turkey was getting fully dressed to jump into the pool. Joey giggled and held a small stuffed turkey in the air. “Up!” he said, grinning. “Up”.
As Joey’s use of his AAC eye gaze device has increased I have begun including the communication purposes of Joey’s utterances into my data collection. While at first we were just tracking how often Joey used the device within a ten minute period, this summer we realized that it was time to expand our observations. Now, when we take a language sample for ten minutes we track the observable purpose of Joey’s communication. [Read more…]
“If you want to see competence, it helps if you look for it.” Douglas Biklen
Sometimes I find it takes a long time to explain Joey’s successes because there is so much background needed to set the stage for each story. Sometimes it involves explaining where words are on his AAC device, or how he uses his AAC device and words to communicate, or even what an AAC device is. These stories get complicated. That being said, read on because I think you’ll be as proud of Joey as I am. 
“I want to eat the mueberries!” I made the puppet say, “What rhymes with mueberries?” Joey scanned his hand over the two pictures of fruit on his tray – bananas and blueberries. Then, instead of handing me the picture like I expected he went into his words and said blueberries. “Exactly! Mueberries/Blueberries rhymes!” I celebrated, and then made my puppet pretend to eat up the mueberries while Joey looked on confused. I don’t think he appreciated my game although he was fine answering my rhyming questions. 
“How many dogs are there now?” I read aloud to Joey, as we worked our way through one of our current favorite books, 
