tinue to occur to further build knowledge and skills.
lying on the mat in PT, in the sun) • Word relationships: Provide students with fill in the blank of a sentences with an appropriate word from a set (e.g., My classmates ______ me when they answer my ques- tions, I must be ______ in my community, You can sit next to me to protect my physical ______; targeting words ac- knowledge, include, and boundary in a unit about teach- ing respect) • Sentence generation: use AAC systems or a closed set of choices to complete a sentence starter (e.g., My IEP tells someone about…; People can respect me by…) In addition to explicit vocabulary routines, customized so- cial narratives (Sam & AFIRM Team, 2015) provide examples of new vocabulary (words and phrases) in a narrative format to help hear and learn information (e.g., Let’s go to an IEP meet- ing; My Accessible School). Customizations include using real pictures of places and people, targeted pre-stored phrases that may be added into devices, contexts that are relevant to the student or staff, and use of skills that are accessible to the stu- dent. See the video below of a customized social story teaching the phrase “ask me first”.
VOCABULARY As referenced above, the Communication Bill of Rights serves as a foundation for knowledge. To begin, a communica- tion bill of rights dictionary was created to support consistent reference to the vocabulary we were using for students and paraeducators. We took the lengthy, complex right and paired it with a symbol. We identified tier 1, or high frequency words / core words, to use when descriptively teaching the right. See the video here to see our communication bill of rights diction- ary below.
Explicit vocabulary instruction routines (Geis & Erickson, 2021) provide structured and consistent introduction and teaching for new vocabulary. Through use of tier 1 words (high frequency/ core words) to define tier 2 and tier 3 words we en- gage in a process called descriptive teaching. For example, a right is something we all + get and it tells us what we can +do . We can break down “the right to be addressed directly and not be spoken for or talked about as if not there” by using tier 1 words (e.g., talk to me) to descriptively teach this right. To more deeply understand content vocabulary, we engage students in activities to develop comprehension, such as: • Examples and non-examples: Look at pictures represent- ing the word ACCESSIBLE and determine if the picture matches the definition of accessible (e.g., picture of a ramp going up stairs or an automated door button com- pared to stairs to enter the building and tight aisles of the library with books on the top shelf). • Generating Situations: when considering times when LOW-TECH tools are used, students consider parts of their schedule where they might need to use a LOW-TECH or ALTERNATIVE communication tool (e.g., swimming pool, Example of communication bill of rights dictionary YouTube Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ tm8SkYOcIU
Example of ask me first YouTube Video - https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OsebiCkTybQ
LEARNING ACTIVITIES There are endless activities that can target skill develop- ment in a structured setting. To move from knowledge to ac- tion, we want to create structured opportunities to practice real skills that can easily be used in a larger setting. The intent of this section is to provide some examples that have worked in our classroom because they have been engaging, have yielded skill development, and have clearly facilitated movement from content knowledge to skill use. We want to focus on skill build- ing in age appropriate, authentic, and applicable opportuni-
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