TRANSCRIPT
Supporting Symbol Use Through Symbols & Meaning (SAM)
9/8/25
 
>>Stacey: I have a screenshot up here from the American Printing House for the blind website where you can get SAM. I just wanted a visual up here for those of you who maybe haven't used SAM or seen it before. It is a pretty big kit that comes with a guidebook. It comes with a games instructional manual and a bunch of different types of supplies that you can use for some of the games that we're going to be talking about and sharing about. It is $428 on federal quota funds and it is written, designed, and created by Millie Smith so you know it is pure gold. Today I'm hoping to use our time to share just an overview of the symbols and meaning approach. And really help clarify who this approach was designed for. What types of students that would really benefit from this approach. And, again, just an overview of how it's used. How you as a teacher can bring it to your team and make it really impactful for your students. So I hope kind of to bring this product to life and share a little bit more about it with you. But first I'd like to share just a little bit about myself. I am starting my 16th year as an itinerant TVI in Texas. I currently work in Copell ISD, just outside of Dallas. When I started in Copell, I was lucky enough that Millie Smith was coming to do a training with my team here. So she came -- I guess about 14, 15 years ago and did a training with my team. And that was classroom teachers, PT, OT, SLP, O&M, APE, technology, me, the TVI, of course, and we were all learning together about the Sensory Learning Kit. And that is her original project that is for supporting students with the most significant disabilities. And so, again, we were lucky enough to learn from her and learn about that routines-based instructional approach. We ended up partnering with her on a research study where we were measuring the impact of that routines-based approach. And every single one of my students in that research project made incredible progress. We ended up publishing that research in the journal of visual impairments and blindness in 2020. And then she asked me to help her with the update to the Sensory Learning Kit. And that is Sensing and Learning. You see the picture here on the screen, I'm holding up that book that we were able to collaborate on. And it was just absolutely just an honor and a privilege to get to be part of that with her, to work with her, and also just to continue to be mentored by her and to learn from her firsthand. But what many people don't know is that after our work together with Sensing and Learning and the routines research study that we worked together on, she continued to come to my district to train and consult with our team to really help us continue to work with our students and learn the best strategies to use with them. And so we learned a lot from her about the Symbol and Meaning approach with our students. Symbol and Meaning is kind of the sequel to sensing and learning. It's that next step for students who have developed a strong foundation in exploring and learning about objects. Again, just incredibly grateful to have that hands-on learning with Millie about SAM and about how we can use it for our students to help them to make progress and really learn about the meaning behind those symbols and use those effectively. So before I go too much further, I would love to hear from you in the chat if you've had experience using sensing and learning or symbols and meaning. Just if you can share in there if you've used both, if you've used neither or one or the other. Because I think that's going to be really helpful to me as we kind of continue on during this session. Throw that in the chat for me. Your experiences with either or both of these products. 

>>Kaycee: We've got all kinds of stuff coming in. We've got somebody saying a little bit of both. One has used sensing and learning but not SAM. And some students that are learning about both right now in their coursework. Several people have never used either of those products. They're new to a few different people. SAM -- experience with SAM but not sensing and learning. Experience with sensing and learning but not SAM. You have a good mix. 

>>Stacey: That's great. Hopefully during this webinar you'll get a good idea of just a little bit of both of those two approaches but mainly with Symbol and Meaning, really who is the student this is geared towards. I do feel like most of the time when I'm out in the field working and training teams on sensing and learning or SAM, a lot of people have heard of sensing and learning. I feel like a lot of our students come to us with just not a whole lot of skills that they can put to use yet and so this is really that foundational piece for those I think this will help make sense as you think about your case load or students you have worked with in the past. Sensing and learning is really geared towards students at the very beginning stages of development. These are probably our students with the most significant disabilities. They're functioning at that zero to 2 cognitive level. So any chronological age, but cognitively added that zero to 2 level the sensorimotor stage of development. These are students on your caseload who are learning to attend to objects. So maybe they sleep a lot or they're really fussy or difficult to engage. So you're teaching them to attend either by listening or looking or touching objects. Maybe the students can attend but they don't yet have the skills to explore objects on their own. Through sensing and learning we're teaching students to learn, to explore, to learn about that cause and effect and engagement with different objects. Then these students are also learning about objects, really what they are and maybe what they're used for, the purpose behind that. At the sensing and learning stage and with this approach, we're really just helping them to increase their engagement with objects and people around them. And learn to use their body to interact. The main instructional approach from sensing and learning are highly structured and accommodate routines. If you have been to one of my webinars or been to a training, we spend so much time thinking of every step of a routine. They need that high accommodation and high structure to be successful. And what that does is it really focuses on building coherence, trust, and engagement. And that's the main focus of sensing and learning. Towards the end of that sensorimotor stage, students are beginning to have emerging symbol use. We may start to see a connection between an object symbol and one of the routines that we're using with them. That's a really good indication that they're building strong skills at that sensorimotor stage. Then SAM is kind of, again, that sequel, that next step. SAM is really geared towards students at the 2 and up cognitive level. Really that pre-operational stage of development. These are students that are expanding their symbol use and understanding. So we may see them responding to words or sign language that we're using. Maybe they're showing us a recognition of picture or object symbols on a pretty regular basis. They're showing us in their actions and understanding that there's a connection there. And they're beginning to really expand on their concepts about these things, about the different objects and people and actions in their environment. Sensing and learning is just that initial engagement and symbols and meaning is really creating a more robust conceptual development behind that. Sensing and learning was focused on a routines-based instruction but symbols and meaning is okay to be a little bit less structured. A little bit less rigid and it's not so focused on the routines and it's more of a games-based instructional approach. These games are a little bit more laidback, a little bit more fun. Maybe and so they're really focus on developing these games as an instructional strategy. Now in the middle of this Venn diagram I have some things that both of these products share. Some main kind of fundamental foundations that we really promote for either product. And the first is that they're both highly collaborative. So both of these approaches are meant to be done as a multidisciplinary team. Rarely would either of these approaches be something as a TVI you would just order off of APH and you would take it to the classroom, pull the student, and work one-on-one. They're really meant to be used as a conversation, a discussion, and a collaboration so that all of those different team members can come together and think about how our students can access this learning. It's really the instructional approach and the different team members can come together to make sure that the student is successful. Both approaches are data driven and this is really thinking about using the data that we know about our students' present levels, about what skills they do have to determine the next steps for instruction. So we want to be really careful in either of these approaches, to be thinking about what skills our students have and then teaching just beyond that level. And that's really important. And then both of these approaches are really, you know, focused on setting up an instructional strategy so that we can also take data on the skills that we're seeing our students develop. So it's really focused on that data and being able to determine what to teach and to be able to show as we see that progress being made. And that's really important. Both of these approaches are supposed to be, at heart, really motivating for the student. We really want to think about what does our student love. How can we help our students be engaged. You know, this isn't supposed to be kind of a rote drilling of vocabulary or anything like that. Both of these approaches are really individualized to what we know about our student, to set them up for success and engagement in their learning. Both approaches are meant to be respectful. They're both age appropriate, depending on our students' ages. So we can really tailor what we're doing to be respectful of that. Again, we're also individualizing it to make sure our students are able to participate at their maximum level. That we're really being intuitive to the communication that they're sharing with us. And so those are things that we really want to make sure we're taking into account. And then both of these approaches are really intentional. Again, they're very individualized to the student, to what we want them to work on, to the skills that we think are going to be most impactful in their day, in their life, and outside of school. So we're being careful to think about what's important for them and also to teach them in a way that they'll be successful. That could be the accommodations that we're thinking about, the where and how we implement these things. So those are really, really important foundations of both approaches. So it's kind of what we're thinking about. This next slide shows a bunch of different types of symbol systems that I'm sure we've all kind of experienced in different classrooms and with different students. And to me this is just kind of a reminder of many times as a TVI I meet a child, I talk to a parent, or I come into a classroom and maybe we have a symbol system already created for the student or the teacher has some ideas or they're wondering, gosh, Stacey, I really need your input to help our students be successful with the symbols. You know, these are what we're using. I don't know if they understand them. How can we help them to be successful. And so I think it's important just to remember that this is something that is a big part of our job to come in and help make sure that our student can access their symbols effectively. But as we do that, we can really consider what is going to be the best way for them to continue to create meaning for these symbol systems. And knowing if our students have significant disabilities, that we have these two approaches: Sensing and learning and symbols and meaning. And these are two different types of strategies we can bring to the table and help decide which one of these might be the best way for our students to continue to make progress in what they're doing. So as you think about your students and the symbol systems that they're using and what you know about the skills that they have and that they're showing you, these are some good questions that you can think about. Is this approach right for my student? So the first question is: Are they attending to objects? Do we see them attending and paying attention to the people and objects and actions going on around them? Are they exploring? Do they reach out? Do they touch things? Maybe if they don't have a lot of motor ability but you bring items close to their hands, do you see intentional movement that they're initiating? Are they using or showing understanding of objects and their purpose? Are they showing an understanding of some symbols in their life? Words or calendar symbols. Do they show you they have a connection there? Also, do you think that they need to help build more robust concepts and connections between their symbols? So they're not using everything seamlessly and effectively, you can notice that there might be some gaps and some potential for continued growth. So if yes, then SAM is the right product for your student. And I think that it's incredibly important that we make sure that these answers are yes. Because there's no use using a product with a student if they're not ready for it yet. Because if some of these answers are no, then it's likely you may need to go to sensing and learning and really start with those strong foundations. We want to make sure that they have those strong skills in order to be successful with the SAM approach. And I always show this slide a lot of times during workshops that I'm doing for either one of these approaches. Because it applies to either one. But it's so important, especially as a TVI coming in to say, you know, I'm bringing that instructional foundation to the team in regard to these skills. And so making sure that we're teaching our students in their ZPD, which is their Zone of Proximal Development, we need to making sure we're teaching them here. As educators this is strongly supported by the work of Vygotsky that this is how we make sure that our students have the capability of learning and progressing. So I like this visual here because it just reinforces the fact that where we teach them matters. So in the blue circle in the middle it says ZAD. That's kind of showing us where our students actually are. It's their zone of actual development. So we're taking into account the skills that they currently have. And if we just continue teaching them there, they're going to get bored and they're not really going to learn. So if our students are at that sensorimotor stage and we just keep on teaching them there and there and there, we're going to get stuck there. Right? But the zone of distal development is that whole yellow area. That stands for skills that are just very too far beyond their current level. So if we have students who are just learning to attend to objects but we want to implement SAM and we want to work on these symbols, unfortunately it's going to be unproductive and we're going to hit frustration levels and disengagement. So that's not going to be effective. We need to know where our students are and we need to teach them just beyond that level. And so I think it's important to understand that continuum between sensing and learning, those foundational skills. And when we start seeing emerging skills into symbol understanding and symbol use, that's when we know that it's time to break out that SAM kit and really take a look at how we can expand those symbol knowledge and meaning. So that's kind of laying a foundation of who symbols and meaning is for. So I would love just to check in and make sure that that all sounds, you know, good to you guys, that you don't have any other questions about who it might be for. Feel free to share in the chat and I'll kind of check in on any of those questions if you're thinking about. Truly, I feel like this is one of the things, as I'm working with teams and doing trainings with teachers that oftentimes they say, gosh, we just feel stuck. I feel like I've been trying these different strategies and my student is not making progress. What do you think I can do next? Oftentimes if we come back to the table and really take an assessment of where they're at, what we find is that we're probably teaching them skills that are too far beyond their current level. I would say 95% of the time that's what ends up happening. We end up having to take a couple of step backwards, build some foundations, build some gaps, and that allows us to continue moving forward. But, you know, the case with my team when Millie came to work with us, we were able to build those skills at the sensing and learning stage and then we were like what do we do next? What do we do? We see some symbol understanding. We see some kind of scattered skills with responding to some symbols to some of the words that we're saying. So we are so grateful that she was able to really share the SAM approach to kind of teach us how we go to the next level. I'm not sure what's happening here with my slides. Let's see what's going on here. Not sure. Okay. SAM. Okay. So we kind of have an idea of who the product is for. Now I'd like to give an overview of how it's used. So we're going to break down some of the things you'll find when you open up the kit. The first is the guidebook. You'll also find some assessment tools within that guidebook. And then you'll have the games book and the games materials. We're going to start with a guidebook overview. And just like with many of Millie's products, I feel like the guidebook is where, you know, the meat of the matter is. I find that her guidebooks are really just really thorough in helping understand some of the concepts we need to know as teachers in order to implement these different instructional strategies. So I know sometimes it's easy as a TVI when we're super busy and we don't have time. But if you do have time, I would highly recommend this guidebook because it gives just a lot of foundational information about how kids develop concepts. And really helps kind of paint a picture as a TVI of how we can help come in and make this a more meaningful process. In terms of concepts, the guidebook kind of explains how with SAM the concepts that it's focusing on are four main areas: People, objects, actions, and places. So obviously there's a whole slew of concepts that students may learn over time. But SAM really focuses on these really concrete types of concepts. Specifically concepts that have a concrete reference. So something that a symbol might represent that has an actual, tangible thing that we can connect it to. And so this is a really good place to start for those students who were just coming to have these emerging symbol skills. For our concepts when we think about people, objects, actions, and places, we want to think about does our student know what it is? Do they know what it does? And do they understand how it relates to other things? So with SAM, we're really going to start breaking down all the different people, objects, actions, and places that are part of their everyday life and really ask ourselves these questions. And if we don't feel confident that they know some of these things, that's where we want to come in and provide that extra instruction, that extra practice and really work with them to get there. One of the other helpful visuals from symbols and meaning is this inverted pyramid and it talks about these four main areas and how students learn about these concepts effectively. And so with the inverted pyramid it starts at the bottom with the student's own body. Learning about people, objects, and actions, they're learning about it first and how they experience it with their own body. So their open body parts. Their own body movements. If we feel overwhelmed about all of these areas and concepts, we can start here at the very beginning with what is impacting our student and how they're experiencing that within their own body. Next we have people, objects, actions touching the body. Things we can bring to our student, whether it be different objects that are touching their body. You know, their articles of clothing. Maybe things that they eat. Things that they're experiencing that are touching the body. And those things are going to be maybe the next place to start when we think about the concepts. Then we have people, objects, actions, and places beyond the body. It goes even further to people-object place relationships in events beyond the body. So really it continues to get more abstract and more expansive in terms of the expectations of these concepts and how they grow and relate to one another. Again, just thinking about our students with visual impairments and, again, multiple disabilities and the different barriers they are encountering in terms of their ability to develop these concepts just with that sensory loss and the lack of maybe ability to move around and get all this information. We just need to be really intentional as a team to make sure that we are creating opportunities for these concepts to develop and that we're helping to shift their attention from their body and things touching their body to things beyond their body as well. A lot of this guidebook is just reinforcing the need for intentional and planned experiences for our students with these important concepts that they need in order to make sense of their world. One of the things the guidebook talks about is helping our students construct schemas. And really that idea of building more robust concepts about the world around them. I think constructing schemas about concepts kind of like building blocks where it starts with at the bottom they're experiencing that sensory information. They're feeling it. They're hearing it. They're touching it. They're smelling it, maybe they're tasting it. They're getting all this information. And then we're giving labels to it. Maybe we're giving that word, that word symbol where we're explaining what something is. Maybe we have sign language that we're showing the student to represent that. Or a picture symbol or an object symbol. So we're giving it a label. They have the sensory experience. We're giving it a label. And slowly but surely they're putting all these building blocks together and starting to create patterns for organizing concepts. Really at this pre-operational stage as this symbolic understanding is taking off, these schemas and these building blocks with growing and growing and we try to make sure that our students are having those meaningful experiences to build schemas that are strong and they're true and they're robust and they're full. And this could be a lot of work for these students with, you know, sensory loss and reduced mobility in their body. It's our job to fill in the blanks. One of the ways that describe it in the book is for every concept, thinking about it like a file folder that as our students are experiencing things, they're just adding different pages, different files to this file folder. So as they experience a dog, for example, they're feeling the dog. They're petting the dog. They hear a name for the dog. But then they experience different types of dogs. And each one has a different texture to the fur and a different bark and a different way that they act. They learn, you know, about the dog's collar and the dog has food and water. So we're just helping to build these schemas. We're helping to make that file folder just more expansive and more expansive. So, again, SAM is really about being aware of what exists for our students and their schemas in those file folders. Being intentional about how we plan for building those things and then making some games to reinforce and to teach it for them as well. In the book they give a great example of just cookie making. I think this is a common activity we see in some of our special programs where, you know, I know in one of the classrooms I go to they bake on Fridays and so they sit around the table and students each have a turn. Maybe somebody dumps the mix into the bowl and somebody stirs. Somebody pours the oil. They make the balls of dough and put it in the oven. And so this is a great activity, something that they might experience often. But for our students, we have to be really intentional to make sure that they are experiencing those sensory experiences and the labels at every single step. That they are really having each of those experiences hands-on because they're likely kind of missing some pieces if they're not part of every single step. And so we want to make sure that their cookie-making schema is complete, that it's robust. That it's meaningful so that as we continue to have conversations and words and symbols that we're using about these steps, that they truly have meaning. And that's really kind of the heart of this SAM approach is just that we want to make sure that as our students' concepts grow and as their vocabulary grows and as their symbol use grows that they're all growing together so that it's truly meaningful for them in their life. One of the ways that we can support this concept development, this schema building is through sensory bridging. This was a new term for me when I learned about symbols and meaning. And it just means that we're creating a bridge between the near and distance sensory information. It's just another strategy we can use to help bridge that gap to help make those schemas more complete. And I think we're really knowledgeable about this in our work with students with visual impairments. Even our typically-developing children with visual impairments, we talk about all the time how mom's cooking in the kitchen and she's getting out the pots and pans and she's turning on the water. You know, turning on the blender. And we hear all these different sounds. Without actual hands-on experience or without some kind of verbal explanation or labels being given, our kiddo is not really creating a lot of concepts about what's actually happening. So sensory bridges would be making sure that if we are hearing some noises in another room, can we help make that connection by creating a near experience and giving it a label. Again, this is just an intentional way to bridge that gap between some of our distance experiences and creating a more hands-on near experience for the student. Okay. So that's kind of just in a nutshell kind of the foundation of symbols and meaning. Just this idea that we're creating concepts. It's our job. We're like, okay, we've built a foundation in our student's awareness and engagement with objects, now we want them to have real meaning. We want to put all these pieces together for our kiddo. A great example would be, you know, I walk into some classrooms and they have a Little Room and they have some kitchen gadgets hanging from a Little Room and the student is engaging with that and interacting and exploring and how important that is. And so at this level we're now taking that experience and really putting it into practice. And , you know, getting some hands-on experience with what those objects are for. And we're giving labels and experiences to them in a true, meaningful way so that they're not just objects, they're symbols and they're things that have a purpose, a name, and a use. So the next piece of symbols and meaning is the assessment tools piece. If I were to be honest, I feel like this is the part that might scare everybody away. If you open up the symbols and meaning book. Because the assessments piece is huge. However, I want to say with a really big note here. In no way when Millie created this really big assessment did she ever intend for it to be used like every time for every student. She created a really thorough assessment tool that is there for any situation that you might be in with your student. She created a lot of different environments that your student might be in and gave examples of different people, objects, actions, and places that might need to be taught and tested. And so I think that probably if she were going to go back and do it again, it might look a little different. I think people can be overwhelmed by this piece. So I'm going to kind of bring out probably the more simple parts of it, the things that I use most right now with my students and that I think have the most impact. And those are going to be two main pieces of the assessments. So they're called SARA assessments. That stands for symbols and reference analysis. That comes back to this idea of the symbols that we're using, the words, objects, or picture symbols. And the reference, the actual thing that represents. And so we're going to look at that in both our student's common words that we think they're encountering and then some of their academic words. These would be the two main assessment pieces that I would recommend starting with if you're working with a student who's beginning to use symbols. So for the common words analysis, this is where I would use when transitioning a student from a routine and looking at implementing SAM. So I have an activity I have done with a student with a balloon. We had a balloon routine where we filled the balloon with a balloon pump and then we played with the balloon back and forth. And so that was our sensing and learning routine that we used to build engagement and learning about objects in that beginning stage. Once we established that, I decided to do the SAM assessment. We looked at the SARA, the common words assessment, and we thought about what are some of the words the student encountered in this routine. You can fill out who are the people words. Ms. Scott was the teacher and she would introduce herself at the beginning of the routine. It's going to guide us to think about what is the near experience that the student has. And she's feeling the teacher's hand as she's saying her name. The sensory bridge is that she's also hearing the voice. So we're giving a name. We're having a tactile engagement and we're having a sensory bridge with another sensory component. So we can list that there. There might be items on this list where we realize the student didn't have a near experience or a sensory bridge. That would be a big ah-ha for us as a team to make sure that we're implementing those things there so that the different people and objects in this routine are developing a deeper concept. The other object we have in this routine was the balloon. And so the near experience that the student had with the balloon was they experienced the empty balloon before we filled it up. And they experienced the balloon when it was filled with air. The sensory bridge is that we padded the balloon and so they could hear that sound that the balloon made. And it made kind of a distinct sound as it's being tied. So those were two other experiences, sensory experiences the student had with the balloon. And we can make sure that as we're doing that we're using the label and we're having that near experience and the sensory bridge. So, again, this can be a guide not only of the different words and symbols the student's engaging with but also making sure as a check for our team that we're being cognizant about making sure that we're building in those sensory experiences. Here's an example of the academic vocabulary. It looks exactly the same but you might just list all of the words or all of the objects that the student might be engaging with in their academic day. So this could be their backpack and crayons, their lunchbox. All these different words that we think we're using and that the student -- we think, yeah, we think they know what that word is or they should know what that word is. Or we have a symbol for it in our daily calendar. We want to make sure they truly have concepts that back that up. So these are kind of the two main pieces that get us started for our assessment of what are the words that our student is engaging with. What are the objects or symbols that we think they should know? And it's kind of a check on the team to make sure we're providing the concepts there. Now, when I do this assessment, I put it into a Google Doc and I actually create another column, another two columns for myself to make this assessment more meaningful for my team. One of those is to indicate are we at the teaching phase for this? Have we noticed that we think the student needs more, near sensory experiences. The other would be for the testing phase. This is where we can say I think my student knows this word. They have had a ton of experience, you know, they have drank out of that cup every day for the past five years. They know what that cup feels like. They know what it tastes like. They know what it sounds like. They know that concept and so this would give us a chance to kind of test that out of context and make some notes there on the assessment. And this is great information to help drive where we're going next with our instruction. Kind of on that jet, I want to share just about my experience with Joey. I have shared this before. If you have been to another training. But this was probably the biggest aha moment for me during Millie's training. We had a student named Joey and she was excellent at her different routines that we had for her throughout her day. She would read or Calendar Box of her routine. She would go to the location. She would do all the steps. We were so proud of ourselves and we knew we were so proud to show Millie what a good job we were doing. And so Millie, when she came, she asked us this is great. She does this hand-washing routine and she's really good at it. She seems to really know what is expected of her in this routine. How many of the words in this routine related to the objects and actions do you think that she knows? And we were all like, oh. She knows everything. Because we go in there and we tell her to turn on the lights and she does that. Turn on the water. Get the soap, wash. Turn off the water. Get the towel. We had all these actions and words that we -- honestly we would put money down she knows them. And Millie was like, that's great. So what we're going to is go into the bathroom where she washes her hands and I'm just going to ask her to do some of those things or get some of those things out of order and we'll see how it goes. And so we went in there and Millie asked her to get the towel, which was just lying right there by the sink. And Joey reached up and turned on the lights. And she said get the soap. And Joey turned on the water. It was pretty evident to us pretty quickly that even though we thought that Joey knew all of those words, all of those symbols, what she really knew the order of the routine that we had taught her. And so she was the perfect candidate to really work on some SAM games where we really helped to emphasize the word and the object connection, to make sure that she really knew the labels for those things. And we could think about how could we teach those things in another environment. We did some dish washing where she had to use some of these things and we could reinforce that vocabulary. So we really were thinking about how could we build greater schemas for her and concepts about these things and then how could we use the SAM game as an instructional practice for reinforcing this vocabulary. And so that kind of leads us to this next part in terms of the games overview. And I think this is the fun part because -- well, for me I just like the instruction part. Always the best when it comes for students. Because this is really that hands-on teaching that I love to see. And this is where we start to see the progress. So just a bit behind the SAM philosophy. The games, you know, instructions for games, because I think it promotes comfort and safety. It builds confidence and success. It's fun. It's pleasurable. It maximizes active learning. It's appropriate at any age and it's individually accommodated. That's why she created it as a game and all of these games I'm going to show you a couple of examples with videos. You'll see the kids are having fun. In a way we're trying to trick them into learning vocabulary and we're drilling these concepts because we're trying to make it fun. We're going to set them up for success and tailor back and give them an opportunity to show us what they know. Okay. So this first game is called the slap game. And so this would be a great example of maybe a game that I might have played with Joey with some of the objects like the towel or the soap and some other things where I'm wanting to reinforce the word and the object and just build that connection so we know it has meaning. I'm going to play just a little bit of this video for you now. Let me fast forward Millie. That's probably a crime but I'm going to start here where we see the video. [ Video ] 

>>Stacey: Okay. So you kind of get the idea they have some different objects in here that they're wanting to reinforce the word and get more hands-on experience with the object, but they're just making a fun game where he slaps it and they're doing it together. This is just a fun way to teach, to reinforce those concepts. And then there's the opportunity to kind of test it. Maybe you're putting two objects on the tray and you're letting him feel each one and then you're asking him to slap the correct one. So it's teaching the concept of the game, making it fun, making him successful. And then, you know, it gives room for testing and for teasing out what he does know and what he doesn't. It's just showing a great example of just a fun, motivating, engaging social game where we're working on reinforcing those concepts behind the words. Here's another example. This one is called whoopee clothes. This one is fun too. This one is teaching the own body. This one's got a little girl where she's learning her body parts. [ Video ] 

>>Stacey: So really simple where we're using the hair dryer, we're naming a part. This little girl loves that cool sensation. We're creating a tactile experience on the body part that we're naming and then we're giving an opportunity eventually for her to show us that she understands that. We can go out of order. We can ask the named body part. As you see, for example, she could lean forward so they could get her back. And that's showing her understanding. But there's the repetition, the practice. It's fun. It's motivating and that's the whole kind of approach with symbols and meaning. So I do want to point you back to the American Printing House for the Blind listing. I'm going to scroll down because underneath you'll see two really important links if you feel like this is something you would like to try and come back to and use with your students. There's a link to the 18 different SAM games. And there's videos for every one of them. And all of them have kind of silly names and different purposes but I like coming here just to get an idea of a different way you could make something into a game. I'll be honest with you, I've used several of these exactly how they are and kind of adapted for my student. But I've also used just the idea of this to like, okay, what about my student? What do they love and how could we kind of replicate this but individualize it for something that motivates them? The real meat here with symbols and meaning is identifying concepts you want to reinforce and teach your student and making a game so that it's fun and it's engaging and it's teaching them but also giving us an opportunity to test it. We want some data. We want to understand like do they really know the word. Do they really know the symbol. And this is important especially as you're building more robust communication and devices for our students. We don't want to run away with it, we want to make sure that there's symbols that have meaning and it can be built upon and then run away with it. We want to make sure that meaning is there. A couple more slides just to show. This is where I want to end our time together day is thinking about, you know, symbols and meaning and like how is this our job as a TVI. Where do we fit in? Why is it important to know about this product and bring it to our team? You know I'm a huge advocate of the expanded core curriculum. I think you could probably make a case for all nine areas of the ECC but for me, the three that really stick out, number one would be compensatory access. So I think that the idea of making sure that our students have strong concepts is at the very root of compensatory access. We want to make sure that these concepts are meaningful, that they're robust, that we have strong sensory experiences with things so that we're creating meaning. That's number one. The symbol systems and vocabulary that we're using, whether it be object symbols, tactile symbols, words, signs, this is all the foundation of literacy. And that falls right into that compensatory access as well. So we are there to support those concepts, to support the early literacy, and we want to be part of that from the get-go. So it fits right in there with compensatory access. Sensory efficiency. How are we using our tactile, vision, hearing, taste, all the things to make sure that we're building our concepts and that we're using those things effectively. So we can model that hand-under-hand guidance. We can make sure that we're offering those sensory bridges as we build concepts. And this is going to be really important -- an important way for us to step in and support the team. And then lastly assistive technology. I think as we have students that are building communication systems, whether it be through object symbols, object calendars, that is their assistive technology and it's important that we're making sure that it's accessible for their needs and that they have the strategies to learn and be effective in it and for it to have meaning. I do want to encourage you. I feel like this is an area I was a little bit unsure about at the beginning of my career but as I have seen where the ECC truly overlaps in this communication arena, it's so incredibly important that we're a part of it from the beginning and we work within our collaborative teams to make it successful. So I know we just have a couple of minutes but would be happy to take any questions and hear from you before we close up. Thank you for that comment about collaboration. Yes, I mean, I think that it's such a huge part of what we do for these populations. And I think, you know, the more that we can bring different tools and strategies to our team and be willing to learn together and explore some of these approaches together, I think it's so helpful. Obviously, I've been lucky with my team. They are always open for that collaboration. But I think it really helps because I think each team member can really see how they would fit in. You mentioned the OT and SLP. You know, it was really clear how they could help their student be able to access some of this learning. I'm glad it's been helpful. Thank y'all so much.