TSBVI Coffee Hour 5 Literacy Activities for Blind/VI Students who are Emergent Readers and Writers Megan Mogan 01/07/2021 >> Kate: Welcome everyone. We'll get started in a couple minutes. As you are coming in, please make sure that in your chat, the drop down men U that it says all panelists and attendees. In that chat box make sure it says all panel IFTS and attendees and you will hear me say that a few more times. Welcome. We're excited to have everybody. We'll get started in just another minute. If you'd like, let us know where you're at in the chat. (Greeting attendees.) Yes, cameras and microphones are all turned off and muted, so you don't need to worry about that. NOEF SKOESH. (Welcoming attendees as they enter.) We'll go ahead and get started. I've got a few announcements before we turn it over to Megan. I'll say one more time but not the last time please make sure that your chat box, the drop down menu says all panelists and attendees. If you have a request or comment during the time Megan is speaking, please put that in the chat box. Your microphones are turned off and your cameras are turned off, so you don't need to worry about that. The handout for today's session will be shared in chat a few times for immediate viewing and then will be available for later viewing along with the recording of this session and our previous Coffee Hour sessions. You can find that on our Coffee Hour page at TSBVI.EDU/Coffee Hour. To obtain your CEUs you'll respond to the evaluation that will be e-mailed to you from our registration website ESC works. That's what you'll look for. I will give you a closing code at the end of the session that you will enter interest that evaluation. So no opening code, just the closing code. We will end the presentation at 55 minutes to the hour so that I can give you the code and make the announcements. So without further adieu we're going to turn the time over to Megan Mogan from Arizona for our session today. >> Megan: Thanks so much, Kate. And thanks everyone. This is really something to see where everyone is from and I just want to hand out a warm welcome to everybody and I am attending from Tucson, Arizona. The southern part of our state. Very sunny and beautiful day today. I just also want to make sure I thank Kate, Kaycee Bennett, TSBVI media team, the captioners, for all the work they do behind the scenes to really make these coffee hours happen. I'm indebted personally to them because nine months ago when Coffee Hour was born I was definitely a regular. It was a real anchor for me personally. It was just a time y'all remember, times were so uncertain. It was really apparent and nice that we all just rooted ourselves in our knowledge and our skills and our professionalism in a real spirit towards sharing and making everything accessible to everyone. So I know this forum was a platform for that and I have a lot of gratitude and in the spirit of that connection today as well. So I encourage you as best as you are able to share here today to join in on the chat and enjoy. This is a very practical based session, so I'm here to share ideas, things that have worked for me, and my favorite part of doing this is always getting to share what my students like. And so here we go. I'm going to get my screen shared here. And if you will, I'd like you to just kind of think back to some of your earliest memories, earliest positive learning. I have learning in all caps not because I'm shouting at you, but notice I didn't say your earliest positive memories of being directly taught. You know, we learn literacy in many ways that are not directly taught to us, and so I'm wondering if you can just reflect a moment and think back to some of those earliest memories. And what you remember. Okay. We've got my mom reading books to me at bed time or at night. Yes. I have those same positive memories. Do you remember the book specifically? Was it like the same one over and over? Dick and Jane books, yes. 100 dalmations, reading with my mom. The run away bunny. It's all coming in now. Bible stories. Stacking up books next to my bed. Did any of you have little bedroom libraries? Writing stories in little booklets in grade one. Goodnight moon. They're coming in faster than I can read them all. Books from the library. I have fond memories of trips to my public library. Second grade teacher readings Charlotte's Web to us. I still have memories of like the smell of my classroom when we sat down for those shared reading experiences. I still have the first book I could read all by myself. That's so great. Books you could follow along with a record player. Yes, I have the same memories. I remember making the connections between a picture of a chair and the word chair, the print chair. My sister reading Alice in Wonderland. Love you forever. Favorite book. The book mobile. Anyone remember that? We had a book mobile on our reservation Jessica says. Yes. Neighbors reading together in the front yard. These are all just such great and rich memories. Melissa adds my best were listening to books being read by my teacher to the class. Unfortunately I don't have memories of my parents reading to me. But I read to my children. The golden books. This is just great. It's like a nice trip down memory lane and I just thank you so much everyone for the flood of memories that you felt open to share with everyone. I noticed some consistent things with some of the memories and I know several resonated with me and my own experiences, but I noticed a lot of people mentioning who the they were reading with. So a lot of us have in common with those earliest memories that we had a connection with another person, whether it was the teacher who read aloud to the class, whether it was a relative or a sibling, there was a connection when you were sharing literacy experiences. I also saw a lot of people sharing di I'm sure you can remember the physical features of it. I mentioned other sensory characteristics like the smell of the space where you had those experiences. Or the auditory memories, the record player sound, the static once the needle hit the record. You started in on the says SAEM street read along. Those were important to you because maybe you felt a connection, you read it over and over again. It was a sense of security knowing what was going to happen next and having that experience every night before going to bed was something that provided you with that sense of safety, security, connection. The definite likes and motivators, you established those really early on. A lot of time the experience of bringing that book that was based on your like or your interest introduced you to a world of new potential likes and interests and motivators. And so it was an opportunity to expand your knowledge of what's beyond your fingertips, what's on the outside world so you could start to explore some other potential topics. I also saw a lot besides connection to others, connection to the topic, you also had access obviously to your distance senses, to see your teacher across the classroom or a book she was holding up, to have an auditory access to something that was even across the room, to make that match between, oh, what is in that book on the print or in the text matches the picture next to it, matches the language that is coming in either through my ears or visually through sign. So you had that critical access piece to literacy even without thinking about it, you were learning literacy at a distance. It was a constant stream of incoming information. So I think it's important to look back ourselves to these early experiences that we ourselves had. They go back to our earliest memories of childhood, because I think it tells you about your own values around literacy and those experiences shape your values. And also they kind of clue you in to starting to think about it, if you haven't already, I think most of you have with your training and teacher prep work, the importance of access to literacy in that ongoing manner in all of those differ And so that really brings us to the topic of today, that word comprehensive. I found myself when I was first starting out working with students with sensory impairments and complex communications needs, well, first of all, I didn't know what I was doing. But then second of all, like really finally tuning out all those layers, I needed to not only provide access, but to provide the depth, that variety of literacy experiences. It's not just a paper and pencil or Braille writer and paper. It's It's the whole thing. I wanted to highlight two TEKTS. This PowerPoint slide show flows like the handout Kate listed here. This whole presentation is really rooted in this text here, really SEM NOL text by Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver called comprehensive literacy for all. The content for today really came out of Erickson and Koppenhaver's work in this text. I do want to add that extra layer through this text, if you don't have that book marked in your web browser, please do that today. This is literacy for persons who are deaf-blind from Barbara miles. This is something if you haven't read it, it's he evering you need to know about students with hearing and vision loss, it's one of those things you don't know what you know and all of a sudden you'll read this She just really breaks down in a very human way how we all read and how deaf-blind students need to have access to the number of different reasons we all access literacy. And Erickson and Koppenhaver remind us -- their literacy, their philosophy is rooted in the belief that students learn what we have taught and often we have not taught in ways that result in a successful reading and writing and that's for two kind of reasons. Because of the complexities of their disabilities but also because of our lack of understanding in how to provide that instruction. That's not a statement that's supposed to come off really as judgeY. It's a statement I think that honors that what we're doing is very complex and to try and think of ways to provide daily access to a number of different literacy experiences for our students is a challenge. I think if we go back to our own values surrounding literacy, our own experiences, and try to figure out how to make those experiences joyful and accessible and places of connection for our students where they feel they belong. When we talk about the topic today of that word emergent reader or writer, who are we talking about? Oh, thank you so much. Charlotte KUSH man one of my mentors has placed in the chat the link to the Barbara miles article. So thank you, Charlotte. I also wanted to say, this is in your handout, but there's multiple links for y'all to as you start to plan intervention, we all know it's only as good as the assessment the intervention is based off of. A lot of times I feel our students are left out of the literacy assessments or because we often teach in these confines of standardized testing environments, we might not have the tools at our fingertips. Publishers in Texas, no offense Texas, textbooks are offering -- we know our students may not be able to check all those boxes. I just wanted to give some tools here through the literacy skills check list and a couple other resources to offer you support in your assessment, in your thinking around where to begin with literacy instruction for our students with complex communication needs. And so if we can bring up too, I just want to give you a picture of the steps to literacy. It's kind of like a scope in sequence that helps us answer this question: Who is an emergent reader and writer. Or I can also click on the link myself. Oh, thanks, LowELL. I know we can't all read the text on here, but if you haven't seen this or you haven't printed it out on legal paper, this is a really nice tool to have on your bulletin board or again book marked on your web browser. Again, it has hyper links directed embedded into these specific descriptions of who we're talking about. If a child is just at the very beginning building a foundation of literacy skills, if we would consider a child to be more of an early emergent literacy participant. And on the very left-hand side of this sequence is a link under the red words first step literacy skills check list, and that will help you -- it's just a check list that you go through based on your knowledge and the child's family's knowledge of who they are and what they can do and what they're good at to help you decide where to start in your literacy instruction. So I'm just sharing this tool because it's been very valuable in my work, especially when I don't necessarily feel like I have been given all the tools to accurately describe my student's skills. A lot of the assessments we're given start at the kindergarten level or just before the kindergarten level and a lot of our students, we know literacy is a process that starts from birth. And that said, we have to be able to describe students who are in the very earliest stages of literacy. Okay. Let's go back to the slides. In the text from Erickson and Koppenhaver, these are the four questions they ask you to ask to help determine, wait, is this a student that I want to target emergent literacy instruction or is this a student who is beyond that and needs more conventional formal literacy instruction? So you're asking yourself: Can the student identify most of the letters of the alphabet most of the time, yes or no? Is the student interested and engaged during shared readings experiences, yes or no? Does the student have a means of communication and interaction, both to receive communication forms and to send communication forms? Notice it says communication and not language. That was intentional. Does the student under the print, and I added Braille here, has meaning? Those are the four questions, kind of like screening questions as we embark on how to set up comprehensive literacy instruction. And so if you answered no to just one or most of those questions, congratulations, you're on the right spot and in the right Coffee Hour because we are going to be thinking about ways in which to provide daily comprehensive emergent literacy interventions. If you answered yes to all four questions, it's not that your student may be a conventional formal reader and writer yet, but you're going to be providing more conventional reading interSENGSs, literacy interventions for that child if you answered yes to all four of those questions. Okay? Hopefully that makes sense. And so if we answered no to one or more of those questions, Erickson and Koppenhaver describe these are really five activities that need to be in your student's day every day, and those are shared reading, shared writing, independent writing, independent reading, and working with letters and sounds. And so basically the rest of hour remaining, less than an hour remaining, don't pass out, I just want to provide examples of these specific to students with Specific to students with complex communication needs, including students who are deaf-blind. So let's just get started. And what I provide to you today, I just added -- this was not from the comprehensive literacy text, this is just what I know to be true based on my experience and based on my work with so many colleagues, too many to name. We also make sure we're providing these things every day to our students. And so that's motivating topics that are based on our student's likes, not our likes. I will add also what makes those likes sensory pleasing to our students. So a lot of time I might share a topic with a student but what I like about that topic and what I get out of it is not the same as my student's, so I just want to emphasize that. All of these examples have been adapted visually or tactilely for the student's learning and memory preferences. I'm not a TVI, but when I grow up I would like to be a teacher of students with visual impairment. Everything has been Taylored to the student's education preferences so because literacy is a process that starts at birth we know it precedes language and it can be used as a tool to have access to language, to learn language. All of the examples provided today have really high expectations, so we're not -- I expect my students to participate, engage and access the materials because they are at their level and they're tailored to their sensory preferences. All of these examples use repetition and routine with slight variations. Remember the brain likes repetition and routine and patter and when the slight variations pop up, attention says I noticed that. All of these are based on -- those literacy skills check list are not something that's one and done. I am taking notes and observations of what's happening during our literacy experiences so I can adjust as needed for the next time we get together. And speaking of observations, I -- Charlotte, maybe you're ain't -- there is a site called playing with words and this is out of Linda's brain and thank goodness it's in this micro site. There is a way to really specifically look for things during literacy experiences so that you can jot them down in a way that's organized and that leads you to designing fun, motivating and meaningful ways that are authentic to the student, that we're not manufacturing anything. But that observation form, tha Guide your observations. Everything takes place in an adapted environment. Everything is taught by responsive partners meaning we are responding to the initiations of the student regardless of the forms those initiations take. Is it a shift in eye gaze? Is it a leg kick? Is it a barely audible response. All of those we derive. Everything top CLI is based on direct hands on and direct communication because unlike the things we listed earlier in the chat, our students don't necessarily have access to all of that incidental incoming information where they can look at a says SAEM street book and say I know about garbage cans because I have one in my backyard I can see out of my window. So we're making connections through literacy through these direct hands-on experiences that we know our students have had and had motivating to our students. All of these examples also allow time for processing and planning a response. And if you have had training out of the field of deaf-blindness, you'll know this as wait time. Let's go ahead and get started with that first daily activity. This is something that we want to happen daily in our students' lives either with us or at home. This can happen in any environment as long as there's this condition listed here, it's the interaction that occurs between an adult and a student as they read a book together. I would say you don't -- it doesn't have to be an adult. It can be a sibling or -- but shared reading involves these characteristics. It involves labeling Kim BOLS, whether they're in the form of pictures, photos, tactile graphics, objects, print, Braille. It involves talking about what is happening in the reading. It involves referring to real-life experiences. So making those connections. Hopefully having hands-on information for the student if it's available. Shared reading involves referencing the print or Braille often. It involves commenting and responding to whatever the student initiates. And I want to say that a lot of times I am -- I did this all the time because I just didn't know any better. This goes back to that first statement on kind of why some of our students are left out of literacy experiences and instruction. I was the victim of always writing, not the victim, I was the perpetrator of always writing answers, we'll -- this sets up for a really boring IEP goal and objective and also to put me in a relationship with my student where I was their tester. I was quizzing them constantly. Who was on this page? Who did you hear? Where are they right now? That is not a high-quality positive shared reading experience. I mean, when you are reading in your bedrooms at night with your mothers were they quizzing you constantly and marking a sheet whether you answered the questions? No, it was an interaction. It was following your lead when they noticed you got excited or when you were really studying a picture carefully. It was all of these things listed here. So I want to take that tester/testEE aspect out of what a lot of us including myself have built up around shared reading experiences. This is a time to interact, enjoy and connect, not a time to test. You can still take data through your observations. So I'd like to show an example of shared reading and set up a video clip that we're going to show here. We're going to see a clip of a high school student who has optic nerve hyper MRASH I can't and she was really struggling with whenever she went to PE -- she had PE every day of the week. On Mondays and Wednesdays they would do treadmill work or walk on the track, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays they would go swimming, and maybe Fridays as well. When she got to the gym on Mondays and WednesdaE What we came to find out based on her love of swimming, this activity, highly motivating event, she loved her swimming and this grew into a lot of shared reading about her calendar symbol and books about swimming and PE. You'll see here we made up a song, BON us points to whoever can name the tune, about PE. Let's watch the clip. (Video with captions) >> Megan: There's the picture of it or the tactile symbol in this case. (Video playing) >> Megan: Again, this is a shared reading experience. (Video playing.) >> Megan: She's kissing her tactile symbol here. (Laughing.) So let's go back and Sarah in the chat asked do you have any ideas for literacy, the types of goals you could write that are more interactive. Let's talk about that in this context here. My goal was you could write a turn taking goal there. When a partner stops communicating and there's a pause, student will respond through finger movements on the graphics, through vocalizations, through a head turn, through activation of a com device, through spoken language. I can go on and on and there's actually definitely resources where we can talk about that with. This student is not a Braille reader. We just like we point at the text of books as we're reading them to kids, that is what I was doing in this example. That is the equivalent. So we are accessing Braille from left to right just like we would point from left to right in our shared reading experiences with sighted students, if that makes sense. And we are using the hand under hand technique. I just wanted to point that out as well. I am not guiding her hands. She can pull away if she wants if that's not what she can take sensory wise at that time or she can access it. I am not going to control her hands just like we don't control the eyes of our sighted students accessing text or print. What else did I want to say about that clip? You know, I just want to make sure and emphasize that we observed an interaction even though it was for reading a calendar or a schedule, you can still turn that into then talking about an activity within the schedule. You can write about it and then have shared reading experiences about what you wrote. There's something else I was going to say and I'll think of it about five slides from here. Oh, this is what I wanted to say. People were tempted on her team and I understand why because it was really traumatic for her to get down to PE and to not swim, they were tempted to hide the swimming symbol from her calendar when it wasn't a swimming day or to keep it out of her reach or keep her from accessing it. It was really important for us to consider that just because you can't go swimming today, you can still talk about it. And just because it's upsetting that you can't go swimming, it's only by referencing it and talking about it that you can get not upset about it. And so on days that we didn't go swimming, she may very well get upset about it and that's whereas a responsive partner and teacher I'm going to pull that symbol, so you're thinking about swimming and let me show you today is treadmill, but look on your weekly calendar tomorrow is swimming. Let's kiss our swimming symbol because I know you love it so much. You can see the emotional buy-in that literacy helps support. It's just a great positive behavior support. Kate talked about that on Monday, to help get through those tough situations. Not because we're keeping those topics out of their fingertips, but we're putting them right in and saying this is upsetting to you and I understand why. Unless you have a permanent symbol to reference back to that, it's going to be really hard to talk about it and get through it. So let's move on to the second daily activity. Again, all of these things should be happening every day in a perfect world. Shared writing experiences. So if you think back to preschool settings, kindergarten settings with sighted hearing students, this is where the teacher scribes or dictates about the days events and what's happening. Out of school the teacher is taking ideas from the students and putting that down in permanent form, modeling written language. Some examples of this, this is what you might see again in conventional emergent literacy settings, (reading screen.) These are all described in detail in comprehensive literacy for all text. For example, like signing in, you might be in classrooms where someone takes their Velcro name and places it on the board, they transfer it from one place to another. That can be a form of shared writing. Is there a place for your student, is there a Braille writer at the front door so they can sign in. Or move a Braille name tag from one location to another. I've taken predictable chart writing because that as we know is done at a distance where you have to rely on incidental means to access information. So I took predictable chart writing and put it on a desk top here. The image you'll see on this photo and the slide is a predictable chart. You'll see that red tub on the left of tactile symbols and then the piece of paper there, you can't really see the Braille, but it's the same sentence repeated four times and the sentence is: Blank goes to PE. And that blank is that -- that black square is a piece of Velcro. The student is going to remove from the tub and name symbols, these are tactile name symbols with classmates names. They're going to place it on the chart and say Jonathan goes to PE and they're going to get the next one on the chart. What happens is as they might read this out loud or you can easily load this on to a single message, single button low tech voice output device. They place the name on the sheet and then blank goes to PE. The teacher might be able to stand at the front of the class or document at the beginning of a day these are all the people going to PE today. I'm just making that up. I just want to make an example of goes to PE. It can be anything. It could be goes to lunch. You can change it up to past tense, went to lunch. You can take attendance today, blank is here or blank is not here. Make it an educate -- I just want to give an example of predictable chart writing at the students' fingertips. Another way I've written up shared writing in detail is through this blog post called school-home journals. If we can bring that up and we can scroll through it just so you can see what's out there and hopefully click on it to get really detailed instructions on how to set up the shared writing experience. Again, this is direct hands-on experiential. You have the student there scooping out pumpkin seeds with his hand. This was a motivating experience so at the end of the school day -- this is a daily shared writing experience where they journal. Even just a single sentence on what he liked about his day. So if we can pause on number 4 there of the photo, this is shared writing at its finest. It's the teacher taking dictation. She is Brailling. He is watching her Braille with his hands on top of hers. Again, this is the equivalent of a teacher beyond the fingertips of a sighted student as a sighted student is talking, the teacher is writing down using print or typing on a keyboard what the child is saying so note in their journal. This is the equivalent, but it's hands on because this child relies on direct learning to access literacy. He is completely blind but hearing. And so she asks him do you want to talk about scooping out the seeds or cutting the top off the pumpkin? He wants to talk about scooping out the seeds. So he basically wrote something along the lines of dear mom, today I scooped out all the seeds of the pumpkin and that was sent home in a binder and the parent has access to one thing original and authentic from the student's day that came from their voice. Okay? So again there are step by step descriptions on how to build that kind of shared writing experience into our daily. In that photo they glue gunned the seeds. This goes back to shared reading, what we talked about before. Use your shared writing materials, things you've put down to permanent form now and turn them into a library that the student and you can share together at a later time. Remember that time way back in October when you scooped out a pumpkin, let's read about that. Maybe you've progressed to a point later on but this is an independent reading for a student because they read it over and over. Remember you could read before you could read because you memorized the entire book? Same thing here. They can pull out see the pumpkin seeds. Oh, yeah, dear mom, today I scooped out all the seeds of the pumpkin. Okay. Let's go ahead and go back. Let's move on to the third of the five daily comprehensive literacy experiences that should be in our students' lives. One is working with letters and sounds. Knowledge of alphabet letter names, sounds and graphic shapes. This is a very as we know through research strong predictor of learning to read when it's taught in context of a range of experiences student led. I don't know if you have a student that likes to play with sound. This is a student with a condition with his retina and he's also on the autism spectrum. He loved playing with sounds. We turned his alphabet knowledge and workarounds using his daily schedule symbols. You don't have to reinvent anything. Use what you already have. In this space we're moving from left to right with his calendar symbols and we've put out, hey, what if every one of your symbols today started with the FFFF sound? What would your schedule sound like? And he just thought this was hilarious because then we would read allowed together, Feading, Fensory, FOOM, Fnack, and fart. You can play with it, play with sounds. I think sometimes we think our students just naturally get left out of some of these more conventional approaches to literacy instruction and they are very much in. You know, play with language and sounds. You will reap the rewards, trust me. One of his favorite things to do and I mention this in the description of the photo, he loved to talk in robot voices. So that was a really great way for us to break up words into syllables, including schedule words. So redeem, reCESS. If you're in class, my attention would drift off, I would stair at that alphabet chart because it had beautiful print and cursive, in a brilliant display at that time above our blackboard. So how can we provide that same, again, it's at a distance, incidental, but that same access to the whole alphabet from A toZ left to right to our students at their fingertips? This relays a description from a blog post out in a hallway, I'm not going to show the video because we are running short on time, but there is a video in this. Make the alphabet multi sensory as much as possible. I could see just by virtue of sitting all day in a first grade classroom to the letter A was up above my teacher's desk and the letter Z was over by the fire distinguisher. That was already setting up the concept to the alphabet, A is on the left and the Z is all the way on the right. Somewhere in the middle are the N, O and P. When I'm in a different class, I'm at the early stage of sounding out words, trying to spell the word pig, I remember back from the other classroom that pig was the picture from the letter P and I have that memory of the way, the shape that the P looks and that's going to connect to me writing it in this other context. It doesn't have to be a wall out in a hallway. It can be a binder that has the whole alphabet in it. In this case we use tactile symbols from the student's own experiences to mark or label each of the letters. So Q is not represented by quilt or -- Q is always represented by queen that none of our students have experience with so we say quarter because they have access to coins. I just want to share ways to make that accessible in a way that our students can use it. What should be a part of our daily experience for our students is independent writing. This might look a lot like preschool or elementary centers where students have independent access to tactile pieces, writing YU tensiles, even things that precede writing you tensile s. Tweezers or in this case markers. This is back when my own child was learning print concepts and starting to independently write her name which is ruby, really asking, hey, can you help me write the word flour or banana or heart, using those really high, really pleasing rich colors to independently write. And not only are we going to offer these experiences of independent writing based on the assessment of our students and what they like, what's sensory pleasing to them, we're going to keep whatever they produce because those are going to become art facts that we use as work samples to demonstrate progress and growth. Oh, they're showing interest in this. I wonder if I offer different shades or this kind of contrast, if that makes a difference in their access to their writing. Use the output here of their independent writing experiences to build the next big thing. That's going to be part of your ongoing and dynamic assessment. And it's not coming from the textbook companies in Texas. We'll get off of that, I'm sorry. There's another blog post by sandy up in South Dakota who's son is deaf-blind and she's also a TVI, she gives great examples and this is linked in your handouts. Subscribe scribbling with her deaf son. Using a Brailler. If the pressure is problem particular for students with low muscle tone I just want to reiterate, this is what they do when an adult is not present and there has to be time built in to play with that. And there's a great video here -- okay. We have time to do this. If we can show the individual I don't have an older student, because I think sometimes we get kind of stuck, our like high school students at that emergent level of literacy trying to find topics appropriate for their reading and writing levels. This is a video of him making a list poem based on the alphabet all based on his own likes and experiences, and him just writing it down in a big old list. This is a video of him doing independent writing not guided by any adult in the room. (video playing with captioning) >> Megan: We actually shared reading here but he did independently write this before the shared reading experience. He's looking, searching his list for the letter S in his Braille. He's a Braille reader and writer but very restricted interests. ( [VIDEO PLAYING].) >> Megan: He wrote Ss for Spanish because one of his classmate's mom spoke Spanish and he'd love it when she came into the classroom and he was able to incorporate that in his independent writing. The photo of his slide is -- I didn't realize the video was shared reading. It's good that we showed that because it's all connected, right? You can use their independent works of writing and again put it into their library and this brings us to independent reading. Take their original works and build a library out of it so they can use it when it's independent reading time. All classrooms are places for emergent readers and writers have hopefully but for the most part have independent reading built into the day at some point. This is a time for students to read whatever they choose. It's not chosen by an adult and it's through access they know where it is in the classroom or in whatever environment they're learning in to a diverse, large, and this is the kicker, growing collection of reading materials. We're constantly adding to it and letting students know what we're adding, what they are adding, and how it's connected to them. Make it fun. Use the bean bag space. Someone was talking about reading in a cardboard box, mentioned that in the chat earlier. Do that for your students. Use fancy head phones that are only for independent reading time. Connect it with their audio preferences so they have the text that matches the audio book. And our only role in the space of independent reading is as an encouragement. We're not selecting or guiding their choices. There are multiple examples in the handout of students who took their own original works and then used those in their independent reading time in class. So I'm sorry we didn't get to show an example of that, but I just want to encourage you to use their own original works to turn that around and turn it into their library of independent reading selections. Okay. And so it is at this time that I'm going to turn it back over to Kate. I feel like we could go another hour, but we're not going to. >> Kate: It just means, Megan, we'll have to have you back for a part 2. Thank you so much, Megan. This was great. Literacy, well I think for all of us, it's why we're here, literacy is a passion for sure. So that was just awesome information. Thank you so much. Okay. Here are closing announcements. I'm going to give you the closing code. Please make sure that you don't lose track of this. You'll need it to enter into the evaluation so you can get your credit for today. The closing code is 010721. And I'll put that in the chat in moment. But again, 010721. Join us on Monday, January 11th. Nancy oh DONL will be presenting on usher syndrome, what's new. And then Thursday, January 14th, for accessible interactive math. With special speakers. Make sure you go to our Coffee Hour page at TSBVI.EDU/Coffee Hour for all of that upcoming registration information. I want to make sure you have it on your radar January 26th, which is a Tuesday, it's not a typical Coffee Hour day, we have a special session with the western regional early intervention conference that we'll start at 11:00 p.m. -- or not 11:00 P M, I'm so sorry, 11:00 a.m. central time and go for four hours and our session will be with David brown. You can also find registration for that on the Coffee Hour page. The evaluation will come to you. Make sure you have the code. Again one last time 010721. And then finally on the evaluation if you would please just take a moment and share additional comments, let us know topics that you're interested in. We have just a couple of spots open for this semester and then of course as we look the next school year putting things together we always want to know what it is you need from these sessions. We put in the chat our code and our website one more time. Again, the closing code is 010721. All right. Thank you everyone. >> Megan: I'm not sure if AMY got off, but she won the tune grandma got run over by a reindeer. I just wanted to say congratulationses, if you're still on. >> Kate: It was a lot of great information. I agree.