"Speech to Print Connection: Emergent Literacy Skills & Technology"

The Challenge: At the beginning of the school year, some of Ms. Riedel's young students who were identified with language disabilities had difficulty with basic sentence construction and expressing their thoughts. These students required special education services to help improve their skills with expressive communication, conceptual development, and language processing.

The Solution: Ms. Riedel used a literacy program addressing emergent literacy skills that focused on communication, comprehension, written language and computer applications. Using a specially designed, sophisticated software program, students could logon to photographs, graphics and text matching the graphics with speech and the printed word. By first selecting the pictures, students were able to formulate phrases, sentences and stories-stories that are told verbally and/or sent to a printer then shared with other children. Oral language skills in the area of concepts, vocabulary, the use of phrases and sentence structure were enhanced. Students also learned the connection between speech-to-print while increasing their literacy skills. For students who had difficulty with keyboard and mouse navigation, special hardware was available: Intellikeys (adaptive keyboard) and a touch screen (in place of a mouse).

Accomplishments: At the end of the school year, the children were generating four to eight sentence stories with pictures while the other students, those who were more verbal and able to construct sentences from the onset, easily accomplish the tasks and goals 100% of the time. All of the students, therefore, met their Individual Education goals and objectives by 100%. The project was expanded into kindergarten classrooms.