'Releasing The Gift of the Gab'

Blaney, R. (2005) 'Releasing The Gift of the Gab' The Primary English Magazine (October 2005)


Focuses a lot more on HOW to talk...
Successful use of voice
- Tone
- Volume
etc.

'A Voice For Life'

Hendy, L. (2005) 'A Voice For Life' Primary English Magazine (June 2005)

More of a focus on strategies for promoting good use of voice
- expresssion
- creating interest
- pauses
- pitch and tone
- speaking for an audience

'Let's Share Our News and Learn To Talk'

Maine, F (2004) 'Let's Share Our News and Learn To Talk' The Primary English Magazine (December 2004)

Talk projects in the classroom

- 'giving a higher status to talk in the classroom offers motivating and purposeful ways of learnig to many children'
- The spoken language 'codes' of home and school

'First steps' organisation of oral language
- language of social interaction
- language and thinking
- languag and literacy

Choosing a context for talk
- focusing aims
- 'newstelling' time, choosing appropriate things to talk about

Overall outcomes and success
- allows children to bring more structure to written work
- write like they say
- the more they say, the more practice they get for writing?

Special Needs Dolls

Article from Time.com about the increase in special needs dolls sales, and whether or not they encourage stereotypes.

Interesting when looking at things like persona dolls, and what message a disabled persona doll would give out.

Would this make a difference in the stories children tell?

Would it influence them to tell a different story?

What about special needs, do they see it as a difference, or is it just a normal doll?

Sales of Special Needs Dolls Increasing

My SEN Resource

Am in the process of making a computer program for interactive whiteboards which would give a sort of 'choice tree' for children looking to start writing their own stories.

The choices will be very limited (probably 2 at a time), and each choice will lead to another which should (in theory!) progress the story a little more. After a few choices, their 'route' will be shown up, and hopefully be able to be saved or printed off for later use.

It's still really early days, so not much has been done yet and i'm still ironing out some details, but I was just looking for a bit of feedback to see if anyone had any experiences of situations with children with SEN and story telling and writing, or specifically children with autism.

Social Stories (Specifically for Autism)

Although are mainly written, alternative social stories can be recorded on video, spoken aloud, or used as 'scripts' to re-enact events or stories.

PURPOSE

1. Social avoidance -- Kids who would fall into the category of socially avoidant might be those who tantrum, shy away from, or attempt to escape from social situations. Often, kids that are this avoidant of social situations are doing so because they have some hypersensitivity to certain sensory stimuli. Consequently, those sensory needs must be addressed prior to attempts at teaching social skills. A kid who is constantly overwhelmed by his environment is likely not going to be successful in many interventions. Social stories may well prove to be useful tools with such children, but only after the sensory needs of those children have been met (through sensory integration, vision therapy, auditory integration, etc.).
2. Social indifference -- Social indifference is the social impairment common to the majority of children with autism. Children who are socially indifferent are those who do not actively seek social interaction, but at the same time, do not aggressively avoid such interaction. Social Stories are often quite effective with socially avoidant kids: they can simplify and illustrate social interactions, with the hope that increased understanding of those situations will make them more attractive and reinforcing for the child.
3. Social awkwardness -- Socially awkward children are typically higher functioning kids who may try very hard to gain and keep friends, but are hindered by a lack of reciprocity in conversation and interest -- they focus on their favorite topic or topics to the exclusion of most everything else -- and an inability to learn social skills and taboos by observing others. Social stories are often very effective with these individuals as they teach explicitly those skills and taboos that these children do not just pick up from their environment. Social stories provide them with a framework for successful social interaction: perspective on the thoughts, emotions, and beliefs of others in their environment, and suggestions of appropriate behaviors.

PRESENTATION

• Illustrations -- The child (or parent/teacher) can illustrate each page of the story, or photographs can be taken of the child and his peers in the social situation. These pictures can add interest and visual support for the presented ideas. Be wary, though, of images that are too complex. Children with autism do not always focus on pictures as we would expect (they sometimes fail to focus on a prominent object in the foreground in favor of some other item in the background), so the pictures (photographs, especially) should be as visual uncluttered as possible.
• Symbols -- The text of the story can be augmented with pictures representing various words or ideas. The Mayer-Johnson Picture Exchange symbols (often generated through their Boardmaker computer program) are typically good choices for this use. For beginning readers, PECS symbols or simple blackline drawings can be substitutes for written words not yet mastered. Or a single, large symbol can represent a complete idea on a particular page.
• Social Stories on tape -- A reading of a particular story can be recorded on audio tape with a tone or verbal cue for the child to turn the page.
• Video -- A film could be made of the student and peers acting out applicable scenes from the story. The text of the story should be edited in before the applicable scene, and the written story presented along with the video when it is presented to the child, however, with the hope of eventually fading the video for the written text (as the text is much less labor intensive to create and use than a video).
• Story boxes -- The child and an adult can act out scenes from the stories with small figures, rooms made of shoeboxes, etc. This too, can add interest and increase understanding of the concepts for children who are not strong readers.

(polyxo.com - A resource for teaching children with Autism)