Hi everyone my name is Maureen Donnelly
and I'm the Curriculum Manager at Tobii Dynavox
and I want to say on behalf of myself and all of my colleagues
that we at Tobii Dynavox are here for you during this very challenging and
unprecedented season where we're managing the Coronavirus at home.
I'm happy to say that we have lots of programs and supports and practices
that we can provide to you that can help you sort of continue to engage your child,
your AAC user, in learning at home and one of them is called Core First Learning.
Core First Learning is a program that we offer to you free
with your Boardmaker Online subscription,
but if you don't have a Boardmaker Online subscription,
we have some ways to work around and still
provide access to this important free program
that we think of as providing a bridge for your child between language and literacy.
So first and foremost: What is Core First Learning?
It's a language and literacy program developed by Tobii Dynavox.
The purpose of the program is to help students,
or children, who use AAC find, use, and read Core words.
We provide you with all the lesson plans and activities
that provide the kind of repetition with variety that makes learning stick,
but it also makes it meaningful and authentic and fun
to engage in literacy and language development at home.
The benefits of this program are that it really
provides this key focus on Core vocabulary,
and Core vocabulary is a powerful and easy place
to help our beginning communicators start to become
more competent and communicative using this small bank
of frequently used and powerful words.
They're also within the context of the instructional approach to
Core First Learning as a focus on reading, right?
And when we support children in understanding that
the words we use in our communicating also happen
to be the words that we read and print,
we're making this very explicit bridge between language and literacy.
And so that's really the power and the spirit of the program we call Core First Learning.
So in case you aren't familiar, Core vocabulary
is a bank of 36 words that we use every day
in our reading, in our writing, and our communicating.
We use them across contexts and partners,
and the cool thing is that while they might seem like plain little words,
(like, not, more, go, want)
They actually have tremendous potential,
not only for communicating my wants and needs,
but also my thoughts, my feelings, and my ideas.
And then beyond their power within the context of communication,
there's an added bonus to teaching our kids to use and read these Core Words
is that there also happens to be a great degree of overlap
between the words we identify as Core and the words that we want our kids to know,
which we call "sight words" and sight words are those words that we sort of
see in the context of connected text in all of our reading
and these are the words that we don't necessarily sound out
or have to figure out we just know them, right?
And so there's power both from a language and a literacy potential
and today we know that language and literacy develop concurrently
and they are mutually reinforcing.
So any support and instruction we provide in language,
also serves to benefit our kids in literacy.
Here's an example: The word "more" is powerful when I use it on the playground.
I want more pushing on the swings, more, push me more, right?
I can use it in math class because 6 is more than 3.
I can use it at lunchtime: I want more spaghetti or I do not want more spaghetti.
And then I can use it at bedtime: more hugs, more stories, more light, I'm scared of the dark.
And so there's so many ways that we can use this word on its own and in
combination to mean lots of different wants and needs and thoughts and
feelings and ideas across the day.
So now that we know that Core vocabulary is
a great place to get started with our beginning communicators,
and we provide that key support within our flagship program, Snap Core First, lets get started.
So, if you're gonna access this program, you are going to go to your
Boardmaker Online account and hit the Curriculum tab.
Now if you don't have a Boardmaker Online account,
you can sign up for a 30-day free trial,
and still have access to the entire program for free
and short of that you can also get access to all of
the books and the lesson plans on myTobiiDynavox, but I'll show you that at the end.
The first thing you're gonna do is print your quick lesson guide.
The quick lesson guide serves as a road map and it also shows you
that we provide a predictable instruction for two really good reasons:
#1: When we provide you with this sort of week to week to week
approach that's the same, it allows our students to focus on
what it is we're trying to teach them, right?
Not on sort of managing the operational demands of every day or every week.
Likewise, when we do the same thing every week,
and as you, as a parent or a teacher, to quickly sort of internalize
and own these an evidence-based instructional routines
and so you develop confidence and competence and mastery of this overall approach.
So, your quick lesson guide is there for you.
It's a road map. It's enough to get you started,
but if you need more support, we actually have step-by-step, word by word
lesson plans for all 36 words of the Core.
So after you've printed your quick lesson guide,
you can just sort of post that on your fridge or whatever.
You might also want to print out a Lesson Plan.
For one, it may be the first or second or third word that you teach
and then I think you're really gonna have the hang of this.
But these detailed step-by-step, word by word
lesson plans are really gonna walk you through this approach
and they leave you with very few to no questions about
how to teach Core in the context of language and literacy.
And so that's your third step.
Your third step is you're gonna choose that word, print that lesson plan, and start reading.
One of the things I want to mention is that in addition to
providing predictable instruction, we also
are very careful to provide lots of repetition with variety
because we know that one of the things our kids struggle the most with
is generalizing what they learn across contexts, right?
And so we give this child multiple and varied ways
to engage with this word in communication, to find and use this word during reading,
to play games with the word, to take a poll, to do a sorting activity, to do a matching activity.
We're giving that kind of repetition with variety that makes learning stick.
I mentioned that, you know, reading is a big piece of the instructional routine.
Each of the Core vocabulary words that we're teaching comes with
three books that target that word at least seven times in the context
of a meaningful story, right?
And so you have tons and tons of reading opportunities
where you're going to get a varied way to interact with this word.
And so while you're engaging in reading, we call this Shared Reading
when we have an interactive and meaningful conversation on every page of the book,
I'm gonna give you some do's and don'ts.
Do find and select Core Words as you read and say them, right?
And so on the previous screen you saw the book "He Is Ready".
And so if I was reading that title "He Is Ready"
while I say the words "he" and "is", those are Core Words.
I'm gonna go find and say them and show my child
that the words I'm reading, he has access to on his AAC solution.
I am gonna make open-ended comments on each page, right?
I'm just gonna make connections for the kid.
I'm gonna externalize how I make connections as I read.
But I'm not gonna ask students to tell me what they know, right?
Because reading isn't a test, it's a pleasure.
And we build the most comprehension when we connect
what we're reading about to what we already know,
not when we're constantly being evaluated.
So we're gonna ask children to make open-ended,
we're gonna make open-ended comments for them
and we're gonna ask, we're gonna encourage and ask for those connections,
but we don't ask for knowledge, right? This is not a test.
We ask for participation, not knowledge, but we don't require it.
We assign meaning to anything we get, right?
So if I'm reading a book about dogs, my open ended comment might be,
"I like dogs" and I'm gonna select the word "like".
My ask for participation might be,
"What kind of pet do you want to get?"
So I'm making a connection, we're reading about dogs, "What kind of pet would you want?"
And I might get no response and in that case say,
"Yeah, I think you're thinking. Hmm, let's think about it together for a second."
Right? I'm just gonna sort of build on whatever I get, even if I get nothing,
I'm gonna find a way to build on that too.
I do encourage you to understand that reading and Core vocabulary learning
is a process and that Rome wasn't built in a day, right?
We're not gonna get results tomorrow but if we stick to it,
we're gonna start to engage our kids in the reasons why we
read in the first place, which is that we learn new things,
we connect to others, we build our world knowledge, right?
And so we understand that it's a process, we don't expect immediate results,
but we are trying to sort of engage our kids more and more deeply as partners
and I do encourage you to make reading fun, right, not stressful or demanding
because we are just gonna turn our kids off, right?
If I got tested every time I read, I'd stop reading.
So we want to just have those meaningful, interactive conversations
that are open-ended and friendly and that's how
we're gonna build that comprehension and that's how we're gonna
show them that connection between the words they see on the page,
are the words I have in my system.
So if you don't have Boardmaker Online, you can sign up for a 30-day trial.
If you don't want to do that, you can sign up for a free myTobiiDynavox account.
And now I'm going to jump out of my PowerPoint and
show you how to do that on the web.
So here's myTobiiDynavox. I have an account.
I'm gonna go to Support.
I'm gonna go to Resources.
And there's my Core First learning.
Here, I find all of my books and lesson plans.
If I have a Boardmaker Online account, or I sign up for a free trial,
I'm going to hit my Curriculum tab.
I'm going to select "Use It."
I'm going to select the country where I'm learning.
I'm gonna select "Resources" to find my quick lesson guide for parents,
and I'm gonna print that.
And then I'm gonna start teaching. Here's my first word.
So thank you very much, everyone.
I know these are challenging days, but I think Core First Learning
could not only be fun, but a meaningful way for you to spend time helping your student
continue to build and grow in language and literacy.
So thanks so much for joining me and I hope you have a lovely lovely day.