Now that Joey is in kindergarten, it is time for him to begin to learn to recognize some high frequency or sight words. Schools I’ve worked in previously have liked for kindergarten students to know about 25 of these common words by the end of the year. After watching Joey confidently learn his letters and letter sounds, I started to feel that Joey was ready for this next step this summer. I introduced them slowly at first, but now I am working on a new one each week.
When I taught kindergarten and first grade, we would learn one of these words in connection with a book or poem we were reading. We would first read the text, then identify the smaller word within the text. We’d break the word up into pieces, talk about what we notice about the word, and decide where it should go on our classroom word wall. We would clap the word, snap the word, cheer the word, and put it up on our wall where we would then practice it every day for a week. We knew those words. We’d write the word on a sentence strip inside a familiar poem or song we all knew, and we’d put that into a reading center that we could practice putting in order. [Read more…]
I plopped down beside Joey one afternoon, and asked him how his day had been. He quickly began chatting away, 
I asked Joey a somewhat mundane question and he gave me the same look he always gives me when I ask a mundane question. “100” he replied. “100 oops.” 
Asking for help on his eye gaze AAC device is something we’ve wanted Joey to be able to do for a long time. We model the phrase “I need help” and try to encourage him to use the help icon as much as he can to tell us what he needs. And he will use it, occasionally.
