Teaching Language Life Skills to Special Education Students

Video Transcript

"It is a lot of systematic direct and it's very repetitive at times. It's estimated the average kid walks into kindergarten with 10,000 words already in their word bank. Some of these kids, their parents don't talk to them at home and so they don't have that and then every year they're expected to add an additional 3,500 words a year and so we are constantly going over vocabulary, especially with the kids with hearing impairments because they don't, they haven't heard a lot of the words that their peers have. And so if we read a book aloud I'm not going to pick the hardest word, I'm going to pick ones that are meaningful to them whereas the regular child in their classroom they would probably have more, words that are a little bit more difficult because they're ready for that. So yeah, they need to be able to speak in a way that presents themselves well, in a way that is somewhat educated so that's why whenever I hear the I hurted myself or just kind of that casual way of speaking I jump on it because you don't have to know a lot but you need to at least present yourself well and you can go a lot farther. Most of our kids know the basics but it's, well some of my kids you'd be surprised like they'll struggle for words like vest or jacket or, and so we're constantly reviewing, anytime we have a couple minutes we'll just go through clothing, we'll go through body parts, we'll go through any kind of vocabulary that we can think of just to get them used to it because I see them struggling to find a word in a social situation and that just makes it already, they're already at a little bit of a disadvantage but when they're starting to struggle with basic words, the other kids are like why don't you know that then it's even harder."