The student and another person can make the personalized experience book together. Following the experience; the focal student can then at their leisure look at the book and remember the experience, the concepts and the vocabulary. They can also share their experience and communicate with others.

Resources:

My First Experience book

Thinking Pod

Thinking Pod

  • Why do you think the adult selected things that represented the student’s mother, father, sister, favorite toy, and the nipple representing his bottle?

  • Can you think of another topic that might be good to make an experience book?

This video shows an example of a first experience book you might do with a child.

Thinking Pod

Thinking Pod

  • What kind of materials do you need to use for the experience book to stand up to the wear and tear of reading the book often?

  • How do you fit making the experience book with the student into your daily schedule?

  • Did you notice how many pages this book was? Start short and simple.

June Downing – Literacy

June Downing  is training a group of people on how to make literacy meaningful to the student who is deafblind and may have no language.

Thinking Pod

Thinking Pod

  • Again, notice the length of the book. Consider the student’s attention span.

  • Did you notice that they found a way to put the words that described the vehicles, the color, and the number in the book? Braille could have been used if appropriate to the student.

  • Think of a like of your student and think how you can create an experience book around it.

He likes wheels, not books

Kathee Scoggin is sharing one way it was possible to get a student interested in books- by using one of his likes: spinning wheels.

Thinking Pod

Thinking Pod

  • Notice the way a baggie kept the grass wet for the student’s experience.

  • The words that were used could have been much larger and been under the item instead of on the baggie.

  • Would the use of a more stable “book” help your student in the beginning?

Using a Wooden tactile book

Kathee Scoggin shares the use of a wooden tactile book to hold experiences

Thinking Pod

Thinking Pod

  • Did you notice how the person made the book?  Do you think it would be more stable in a hard notebook?

  • What are other things you can think to do with an experience like a birthday party?

  • He got a piano for his birthday. Was it the little one attached to the page? Or was this a representation of the piano? If it was a representation, what would you need to do to get the student to recognize that it was a representation and not the much bigger one at home?

Carter’s Birthday Experience Book

An experience book that was created after Carter’s birthday. Balloons not inflated were used as a different material to create the book.