Core words make up 80% of what we say everyday. A more in-depth explanation of core vocabulary words can be found here.
I am new to the world of AAC and have a lot to learn.
BUT what I do know is;
- narratives are important for developing language length and complexity.
- Children love narratives and repetition of stories
- Repetition facilitates learning.
Book Creator App is perfect because it allows you to customize and share your books with others.
Here’s what I did to teach some core vocabulary words to a student that I am working with using Touch Chat
I chose a story called Moo by Roger Hargreaves . The story is relatively short, I really love it and because I love it, my enthusiasm spills over.
I took pictures of each page and then typed in the text on the opposite page. I modified the text slightly because I wanted to use as much repetition of core vocabulary as possible. (I am sure Mr Hargreaves won’t mind).
I then “screen shotted” the core vocabulary and placed them on each page of the book.
I added voice to each core word so that we could tap on it and become familiar with it.
I made the voice invisible in ibooks. This is one of the awesome features of Book Creator.
I exported my book from book creator to iBooks and airdropped it to my student’s iPad so that he had a copy of the book to practise reading at home.
The fantastic thing is that we did not discard the paper book. Once he was familiar with the core vocabulary we could read from the Paper Book and his ability to access the core words improved so much.
Working on core vocabulary is difficult because you cannot represent the word as an icon/symbolstix picture. The only way to get it across, is to model it over and over again.