Digital Edge Project

The digital edge project is an online library that highlights a collection of articles, videos, and podcasts created and posted by certified teachers.

The lesson I picked is called "Baby Signs for Pre-K Children." This lesson comes from a Pre-K Special Education teacher from Florida. This teacher created a lesson that incorporated the use of Babysigns, a program that "uses gestures that preverbal babies use to communicate wants and needs," in hopes to stimulate her non-verbal students to use words/gestures to communicate. For each student she concentrated on their individuals needs and her desired outcomes based off of their IEP goals.
To get started she assessed each student to see which words and gestrues they already knew, and which words/gestures she wanted them to learn. For each gesture/action she demonstrated them by the use of a videotape shots. To get the students familarized with the process of the videotaping she videotaped them for a few days doing various activities. Many of her students have some kind of verbal delay, so she she used these tactics with many students. Each of her two nonverbal students had a targeted vocabulary checklist for each language lesson. She compared the checklists after every lesson to evalutate the effectivness of these lessons and students progress. After a year of using these lessons with the two students she was very impressed with their progress. These modifications and new teaching strategies she implemented proved to increase these students vocbulary and their what was a very limited forms of communication.

I really liked this lesson because it was simple and fun. This teacher reflected on the videotaping aspect and said her students loved interacting with the videotaps and loved beging recorded and watching themselves on tv. This lesson make learning vocabulary fun because its and interactive process. From the article it didnt seem like it took too much prep time, however, preparing for the lesson seemed to be the most important part of this lesson. Assessing students current vocabulary and where you want them to be when they are done with the lessons was a very crucial aspect of this language learning process. I think i would liek to try this lesson in my classroom, however, the teacher who initially implemented this lesson said when she did these lessons it took her entire attention. This means using a startegy like this in a classroom is only realistic if you have at least one para educator with you, like this teacher did. If a lesson is going to take your entire attention you need to ensure that your other students are in good hands with another qualfied professional.