April’s Teaching Blog

SO WEIRD!  I was looking for an article about emergent literacy and disability for class today, and my goodness, but up popped an article by my professor at Appalachian State!  I always knew Dr. Koppenhaver was a smart man.  I am particularly interested in autism and emergent literacy, and Dr. Koppenhaver has written a slew of articles on this topic!  Who knew?!?!  This particular article studied nonspeaking preschoolers with autism, and discussed motivating academic, linguistic, and social interactions aid interventions with these children.  It includes a list of successful approaches to increase these motivations.  Dr. Koppenhaver designed a study to see the results of implementing these interventions, studying “autistic labeled” 4-year-olds.  His results found that all of the children demonstrated measurable and observable gains in the understanding a use of print.  Although it was a short study, he really made a case for his research, and he really did keep it short and sweet.  Great article, great professor.  Definitley a must read for those who have children with autism in their classrooms.

And on to the required reading…It is interesting to me how this article really integrates what is being taught in my Child Development and Disability course.  Things that I took away from the article:

1.  What a great way to have visually impaired children interact with text… act it out!  Use props!  These strategies work for both sighted and non-sighted children.  Since these children cannot see the illustrations, they must be put in some tangible and tactile form for them to understand the concepts.  Woop woop to Wendy, Pat, and Nancy (pseudonyms, duh)!

2.  I really liked the alphabet braille boxes where the children read the first letter in braille and then there were objects for them to feel that began with that letter.  This is great for sighted children as well. 

3.  I thought it was interesting that visually impaired children were exposed to braille as early as possible, seeing as how we are so concerned with developmentally appropriate practices with sighted children.  We are concerned with a classroom of 3-year -olds that have the alphabet displayed in the classroom, but these visually impaired children are learning their version of the alphabet ASAP.  I personally don’t have a problem with exposing babies to letters, I talk about letters with my 8-month-old.  Call me developmentally inappropriate, I’m inappropriate anyways.

4.  Let’s expose sighted kids to braille and talk to our sighted students about children who are visually impaired.  We talk about different cultures and expose children to their customs, we talk about different religions and celebrations, lets talk about visually impaired children and what they have to do in order to learn and function. 

Good articles, good examples of strategies, I give it 1.5 thumbs up.