Today is October 1st and marks the beginning of Down Syndrome Awareness Month. I don't have any big plans to celebrate it this year on the blog, but who knows...maybe I will actually make a few posts! Here is at least one for the month that shows how my little girl is learning to read and loving every step of the process.
I enrolled Sweet Pea in Level 1 of the Learning Program this fall and I'm very happy with the program that is being run by Club 21 in partnership with DSFOC. I've had some of the materials for a couple of years, but I needed to actually enroll to get my behind in gear to use them regularly. I've only attended one class so far, but I'm getting into a good routine of pulling out the books and working with Sweet Pea regularly. She LOVES the books and requests them regularly. I try to not let her access them without me, but sometimes she gets her hands on them and I'm happy that out of all the toys in the house she wants to play with those!
Here are some videos that I wanted to share of Sweet Pea reading through our session.
The first video is what initiated this post. I wanted to share a cool technique that is really working for us. The books are all available via pdf so I used the iPad to screencast me reading the book using a laser pointer to highlight the words. She LOVES the 3 books that I did this with. She follows along and engages verbally as it is being read to her. I am going to have Daddy and Grandma read some too so she has more variety and we can keep them fun. I am happy that she is actually looking at each word as it is being said as when I read the books in person with her she is normally looking at everything in the room EXCEPT the words when it is my turn. This was my first attempt and I will record future ones a little slower, but I'm still happy with the result. Hope you like the idea and might be able to incorporate it into other uses too! (BTW I used Explain Everything to create the video. The app came highly recommended from the Technology for the Journey Conference so I decided to splurge and pay the $3 for it. So far I'm happy with the purchase as it is very easy to use.
This video shows an example of how Sweet Pea isn't looking at the words as I point to them. It's not the best video as I'm holding the camera so I can't be at the normal angle so that I'm not covering the words with my pencil, but she does the same thing when I'm in the preferred position as well. Sorry for the bad audio!
This next video shows how she likes to assume she knows the words without really looking at what she is doing. She catches on though...
Now this video is just strange. You get to watch her recognize a word upside down, a freak out because the card isn't staying put and her guessing two words before even turning the cards over to see the words. But she enjoys this activity and I just recently added the part where she picks the card and she is a big fan of that change.
The final video (ran out of space on my phone partway through it) was Sweet Pea doing one of the accompanying worksheets. She requested this activity by saying "write" so I gladly gave this sweet little girl what she wanted.
I look forward to lots of progress in the next few months and I will have a reader on my hands before I know it!
