PrAACtically Reading: Where’s Spot with Karen Natoci

New years bring new opportunities. Today, we welcome back Karen Natoci, but this time in a new role. Karen will be doing a monthly post sharing ideas for interactive book reading with children who use AAC. In her first PrAACtically Reading post, Karen explains how she used book reading to build language and literacy skills.

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We had a wonderful time reading Where’s Spot? By Eric Hill.  I had both the “big book” and a small, cardboard book.  Most all of the pages contain a predictable line: “no!” Since many of my students were learning to say “yes/no” it seemed like a great way to practice this skill as part of SHARED READING.  The important part is that everyone in the classroom had access to some form of AAC, including the staff. So, while I was reading the story, I paused and the whole class responded together by using their AAC device. Click here to download my lesson plan.

Core Words

Like many of you, we target core vocabulary at every opportunity. Here are some of the words that we highlighted with this book.

• again
• don’t
• go
• here
• it
• like
• look
• me/I
• more
• no, oh no!
• turn
• where
• yes

After we read the story, we had a “lab” activity where the students had to look for Spot hiding in the classroom (such as the window, teacher’s desk, door, sink).  The teachers decided to hide Spot under the rug. Here are the finished lab worksheets hanging on the door to the classroom.

After the “lab” activity, the class gathered together and we wrote the results of their search in a SHARED WRITING format. Finally, we recorded each line in a Step by Step (a sequential message SGD) for students who volunteered to read this summary to the class!

Below is a video of my reading the story in a 1:1 situation. This little girl is learning to use yes/no.  While some early learners may benefit from only having one single switch “no” placed appropriately, other students practiced while having access to the binary array for this story reading experience.