The ‘busy season’ is winding down for me – a little. For a little while.
Which means I’ve had the opportunity to mock up some materials which are based upon my research. The first is something I developed for my dissertation working with children who were non-MAE speakers at-risk for poor academic outcomes.
I call it the CLOUDS Approach -Cultivating Language OUtcomes in Diverse Systems.
I have used the CLOUDS Approach with children who have Down syndrome and ASD as well as children with DLD and/or who are non-MAE speakers. I modified this protocol slightly to be used with Spanish-speaking children learning English as their L2. The parents enjoyed using the CLOUDS Approach embedded in the bilingual storybooks to learn more English themselves.
The CLOUDS Approach is based on structural priming – an errorless learning method. An errorless learning method is needed because the CLOUDS Approach goes big from the very first. The CLOUDS Approach focuses on providing children with functional opportunities to expand their expressive language skills. Multiple trials with very diverse learners has shown that starting with teaching children to ask functional WH-questions and negate utterances nets COP/AUX yes/no questions, 3rd person singular, and regular past tense – all without direct intervention. I also have data that unequivocally demonstrate using the CLOUDS Approach with children with Down syndrome and ASD also improves their speech sound production.
The CLOUDS Approach is meant to be embedded in commercially available children’s storybooks. I used the Little Critter series for my dissertation, but am planning to develop scripts for other children’s books. I hope to be able to extend the CLOUDS Approach to representative books written in other dialects of American English as well. Here is the link to the embedded structural priming for Mercer Mayer’s Just Me and My Dad. I would be very interested to hear from you if you decide to use these materials with your students. These materials currently are not available on other platforms like TpT (at the moment anyway). Each script is designed to be used for 4 consecutive sessions. I have designed the data collection sheet to allow you to collect data for each opportunity across all 4 consecutive sessions.
In addition, I have been teaching myself how to make Boom Cards and hyperdocs. I am focusing on making these materials accessible to individuals who may not be able to use a mouse independently. These are a work in progress as I figure out the ins and outs of making these types of materials, determine ways for children who can’t answer conventionally to demonstrate what they know, and find ways for these children to be able to use their expressive language skills. You can find my publicly available materials in the Boom Cards store under my pen name of loribslp. You can click here to go to the Boom Cards store.
As always, thank you for reading 🙂
Outside The Box 