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Rose Moehring
2/15/2016 11:52 AM
Last summer I had the opportunity to go to AAC in the Desert Conference presented in Arizona, by Dr. Caroline Whiteness and Gretchen Hansen. What an awesome conference! I had heard Gretchen Hansen speak before at a National Center on Deaf-Blindness Conference, and was intrigue by the presentation she did on use of Alternative Pencils for Literacy, and I wanted to learn more. If you want to learn more about alternative pencils you may want to check out the Writing section of the NCDB Literacy Website: http://literacy.nationaldb.org/index.php/writing/ Scroll down and watch the video's of Jake and Matthew making use of alternative pencils to read and write. Development of communication skills is essential component for literacy development.
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Thank you, Rose! I really enjoyed hearing Gretchen and have implemented some of her ideas! The videos you share of Jake and Matthew are classics shared by Karen Erickson as well! Love it!!
Karen Natoci - 2/16/2016
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I have read several things that Gretchen Hansen and Caroline Musslewhite have published and posted and even attended a couple of presentations by Caoline Musslewhite. Their work is amazing. The alternative pencils is an awesome resource. The link you have posted as well on writing is wonderful. Jake and Matthew are amazing students. However, I just want others who read this to think about the process these students needed to go through to develop these skills. It wasn't overnight. However, with consistent presentation their progress was at a similar rate if not faster than normal development from the time they were exposed to a "pencil" that was just right for them to the time they became writers that could be understood. I think it was Matthew who went from random letters, to word like chunks to the beginning of words like "dad" in 18 months. Typically developing children are using pencils to scribble, then learn to make forms, learn the forms can represent something, learn the order and size of the forms can represent a variety of different things, to spelling and it takes about 3-4 years. Matthew starts his first scribbling with his alternative pencil and is forming words in 18 months.
Please take a look at this amazing resource! Thanks for reminding us about these wonderful ladies research and the resources that are available for written expression.
Dee Steinbach - 2/15/2016
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