HijAACked! Putting An AAC Twist on Gen Ed AACtivities: The Hallelujah Flight

This is the first in an occasional series of posts in which we take activities designed for students in general education and tweak them a bit to make them into opportunities for AAC teaching. We’ll be building on great ideas from clinicians, parents, and educators (giving credit where it is due, of course).
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The first HijAACked activity is from the Classroom Magic blog by Selina Smith.  We chose this one because it gives us a chance to promote one of our favorite online book sources, We Give Books and share a wonderful book that supports Black History Month. We Give Books is a project of the Pearson Foundation and Penguin Books (you can find out more here). The Hallelujah Flight is the story of pilot James Banning and his good friend, mechanic Thomas Allen, flew cross country during the Great Depression. Written by former teacher Phil Bildner, this book is engaging and has lessons on many levels. You can read this wonderful book online here.
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Ms. Smith shared two materials for this book, a map showing where the flight landed and a graphic organizer for the story. Let’s look at how we can use these to help kids master language through their AAC systems.
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1. Core language practice: From single words to sentences. Lots of ways to get in some practive with pronouns, common verbs, nouns and modifiers.
2. Lexical diversity: “How many ways can we say this was a good story?” “Terrific, awesome, great, fine, fabulous, etc.”
3. Causality: “She gave him food because he was hungry.” “They got a new runway because of the crash.” “They had a parade because he was a hero.”
4. Morphology: Changing present tense verbs to irregular past tense. Fly, flew. Say, said. Go, went. See, saw. Shine, shone.
5. Dialogue: “What would he/she say?” “Thank you.” “I need help.” “You did a good job.” “You can stay here.” “Come back and visit us again.” “People will remember you.”
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We like to use digital options, like PowerPoint, for activities that generally happen with paper and pencil. We’ve uploaded an example [wpfilebase tag=fileurl id=29 linktext=’Materials for the Hallelujah Flight’ /].
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Hope you get a chance to try the Hallelujah Flight using some of these materials.