Re: small breakthrough with tacting drill

[Guest guest]

Lynda,

Its good to hear from you. I want to second your opinion that using a text

word to object or picture match helps a student learn. I have found it

important to use the text word and now text phrases in our teaching. My

son is not hyperlexic, and he does not know how to read words

automatically. But I have found that using a verbal and text prompt

together help him remember what to say. So we use the text as a prompt and

the nice byproduct is that he learns to read the word and tact the object

or use a phrase to comment.

I remember thinking, surely I shouldn't teach reading before he can talk

normally. Wrong. The reading is his bridge to spoken language. I guess

he thinks in words. And just lately because we are working on writing, we

started teaching spelling. Now I am starting to suspect the possibility

that if we teach him how to spell the word before he can read it he'll

learn both to spell and to read it.

I think you have hit on another important point about how many things to

teach at the same time. I know we learned that lesson the hard way with

prepositions. Instead of teaching pairs of opposites we ended up teaching

preposition + location for example " on the table " " on the box " " on the

bus " " on the house " . Instead of " on bus " and " under bus " that was too

hard of a discrimination.

Thanks for your post. It is nice when people share their success.

diana@...

[Guest guest]

In a message dated 5/1/02 2:19:04 PM Central Daylight Time,

diana@... writes:

> The reading is his bridge to spoken language. I guess

> he thinks in words. And just lately because we are working on writing, we

> started teaching spelling. Now I am starting to suspect the possibility

> that if we teach him how to spell the word before he can read it he'll

> learn both to spell and to read it.

>

, Lynda and others,

I guess this does seem counterintuitive but I have taught Colin language

visually--using word cards--since he was 3YO. He is 11YO now. I think he

has a very small vocabulary compared with NT peers but he can read, type and

use a voice a speech synthesis device to speak every word in his repetoire.

Last fall the communication specialist gave him the Peabody which is a

test of receptive language and his scores were age 4, which we thought was

pretty good considering that he can spell and type all these words as well as

recognize them from line drawing s that look as if they date from about the

1940s.

in Wi.