A visit to the units

 Our ORS kaiako and I visited the units at Marfell to get some ideas to support our ORS tamariki. One idea I particularly loved was to build capacity around letter identification.

It didn't matter that the tamaiti selected random letters, but when their sentence was orally shared with the kaiako, and they selected letters off their card, they were shown which ones they may have got right to support the connection.

It is just another way of building literacy into our programme for our high needs tamariki but also at a new entrant level. I think it is quite genius.

Autistic children can experience delays and challenges in learning letters, letter recognition, and writing letters. Writing and reading are powerful communication skills. But before they begin to learn to read or write, they must first learn to recognise and identify letters. Teaching autistic children letter recognition is an essential step in their emergent literacy skills and this is why I really loved this idea.

Another thing I want our kura to adapt is the large coreboards that can be used in class on a wall or outside. We all know that even before the acquisition of alphabet that oral language is crucial. And I think having them around the kura is essential because we are all communicating the same way with our takiwātanga tamariki.

As Talk Link states: "TalkLink believes communication is a fundamental human right. We are committed to providing the means for people to communicate and participate to the best of their ability."