Robin Hurd

Mary Jane Bradley is the author of this month’s Parent’s Corner. Mary Jane is married and the mother of 3 children, 24, 17 and 12. She home schools her youngest child who has multiple disabilities and uses a Vanguard for communication.

Working together, she and her son have used online courses, internet resources, and various other ways to learn her son's communication device, a Vanguard. They combine all these things to personalize an education at home that will accommodate his physical challenges, yet motivate and encourage his educational
development.

She is on the Board of Directors for GIFTSNC (Giving and Getting information for teaching Special Needs Children), a North Carolina home school group. They are also involved in an AAC group for young boys, FBTT (Fire Breathing Tech Talkers), which meets monthly for activities and encouragement of AAC use.

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Getting Motivated, Getting Results

Most of us remember sitting in History or Civics class, being assigned a portion of reading material, maybe something like, “Checks and Balances of the Three Branches of Government,” and sinking in our seats with boredom. Imagine having one or more disabilities which make even the process of reading hard, then add to that a “boring” assignment and you’re liable to get a child who just “zones out”.

So how do you motivate and teach children with one or more disabilities how to read and enjoy the process? Having a child with multiple disabilities who uses an AAC device has presented a challenge for us from day one! Although he reads well now, it hasn’t happened in a very traditional way.

Anyone who has dealt with a child with developmental delays, who can communicate only through gestures and an AAC device, knows that you cannot pull from the same arsenal of teaching techniques you might use with other children. When you’re limited in communicating with a child, you quickly begin to see it narrows the playing field and you have to think “out of the box”.

Since a child in this situation is so limited in their life experiences, to add upon them educational demands that they don’t understand or enjoy leads to a dead end. Here are some things I’ve noticed that help our son get the most out of learning. 1) He does much better if he chooses his own material; 2) He needs to have some kind of vested interest in the topic or subject. In other words, “what am I going to get out of it”; and, 3) It helps if he can see that he’s going to gain some knowledge or experience that will help positively impact him.

Speaking to the first point, I certainly don’t mean we ONLY let him choose material that’s interesting to him. He is exposed to a typical curriculum. It’s simply that when we do give him the opportunity to choose what he wants to read, we’ve seen more progress. Knowing this, I can actually find material on a particular subject more suited to him.

An example of this happened recently at the library. We did not have his communication device with us. I was pushing his chair down the aisles, picking out this book and that, holding them up and asking for his approval. Frustrated and not making any progress, I asked him what kind of book he was interested in. We went over to the library computer, bringing up the menu page, I asked him to spell what kind of book he wanted me to get. We have a few different techniques to do this, but I proceeded verbally down the alphabet to have him stop me at the letters “S P Y”.

I don’t like spy books. I never would have chosen them. I like cute stories with pretty pictures and sweet themes. But he wanted spy books, so after doing a search we found a few he wanted. I discovered an area of interest I didn’t know he had. I noticed a distinct difference in his demeanor as I pulled different spy and detective books off the shelf, and a greater willingness to read them together when we got home.

Early on he would enjoy having me read to him, but was less than enthusiastic when I’d try to “teach” him. It was only when he finally was able to access a computer, using a Tracker (infrared headpointer), that we began to see his interest in reading peak. He actually didn’t realize my motive was to teach him to read, but in the process of clicking here and there within a computer program like “Blue’s Clues” or “Tonka Trucks”, there would be pictures, along with words, he would click on to activate. The visual and audio feedback added a powerful reinforcement for learning to read.

That brings me to the second point, which is having some kind of investment in the reading material. In the aforementioned case it was the joy and excitement it brought him. Today he has slightly different interests, but the same is true. With those early computer programs he developed a love for online games. I remember the first time I saw him discover the Disney forums for the games he likes to play. Different players discuss helps and tips. I watched his eyes dart back and forth, watched him laugh, shriek, concentrate and persist as he read the different posts. I knew we had a winner. With a typically developing child, I might have reservations about spending hours doing this kind of reading, but I realized that it was the investment he felt in the material that was motivating him to read it, and, after all, that was what I was after.

That brings me to the third point of his seeing some payoff for himself by gaining some experience and knowledge. He knows that the more he learns about these games, the better he’ll get at them, the more points he’ll make, and the higher level he’ll get to. The same thing was true with those early computer programs. For example, Thomas the Tank Engine motivated him in the same way. He needed to be able to get through one screen by reading the material, albeit just a word here and there, in order to move on through the rest of the program.

Even now, I don’t see the same interest in a geography or science book. He will tolerate them. I think that interest will come. But give him material that he chooses himself, is interested in, sees something he can accomplish, and he shines. I believe the reason this is true is because his life is filled with people who make most of the choices for all the other areas of his life. Since that typical childishness, playfulness, curiosity is restricted in a lot of ways; any activity that taps into those natural drives takes advantage of them.

The payoff to this unconventional way is that he is gaining a reading skill that will mature as he does, open up his world and allow him to learn many more conventional things in the long run.

As always, e-mail your comments and questions to parents@aacinsitute.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjbradle2002@yahoo.com . We love to hear from you!