A lot of us with Special Needs Kids have “Late Learners”. Kids who are older, yet still learning to read. I’ve got good news for you: Don’t give up, they can still learn to read!
While trying to teach Ian to read, I came to the heartbreaking reality that there really aren’t any good Supplements out there for older learners. All the Supplements are geared toward younger kids and have lots of graphics and big chunky drawings all over them. Well, we know for our kids, we need little to no graphics and older, more mature looking Supplements in order for our kids to want to use them.
So, I got busy and researched and tested. My poor son had so many different designs and “here, try this … do you like it? Will you use it?” thrown at him, but in the end, he loved using his own Big Kid Supplements. And what’s better – they were fun, easy and they worked!
Ian’s favorite and therefore the first of the Supplements we produced are the Word Fans. The Word Fans consists of 30 Word Family endings that can make over 100 different words! To start out, you print and cut out the fans and connect with a brad. Personally, I made one fan for every Word Family and put them all in a plastic bag. At first, I put them in five different bags (a, e, i, o, u). But as Ian got better and better at making real words, I put them all in one bag and he got to pick out several Word Fans for that days “Fun Time”.
These Fans are very versatile. As your child gets older, you can add other consonants that might or might not make a word in that word family. Another thing we did was to take one of each of the consonants and each of the “a” Word Families and secure them all into one fan. Then your child can make any kind of word or create a “non-word”. That, of course opens up another avenue to teach about words and “non-words”.
So after lots of trial and error, we present the first of many Big Kid Supplements.
Late Learners
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