Over the summer I had hoped to post more about us.

Instead I ended up talking to other people, lots of other people.

There are some exciting and often contentious conversations happening in social media about intervention and alternative augmentative communication (AAC).

A reel caught my eye.

The reel showed a software developer talking about AAC systems and how they don’t actually reflect the research on how to design AAC language systems nor how to implement AAC language systems.

He is an educator and a father to an autistic child, who unlike us, had tremendous success with early interventions.

His son gained language quickly with very similar approaches we had tried.

I commented about our own rough AAC journey and how early intervention was not helpful in the least.

Instead of waving me away. He agreed that early intervention does not work for everyone, and current research is catching up to this realization.

He wanted to learn more about N and we ended up talking on a video call.

He asked questions, listened deeply, and kindly asked more questions that most people are afraid to ask.

If N can’t answer questions or show his knowledge ‘on demand’ how do I know he understands?

His reel shares two stories of his conversations with researchers and the third story was about N.

A story about radical acceptance of disabilities.

Of not requiring N to master prerequisites to have access to knowledge about the world.

Of how communication is a set of shared ideas about the world, and is much more than a “noun + verb”.

Of how N shows us what he knows through his embodied communications, his interactions with his environment, and access to digital technologies.

Of how adapted literature and curriculums, such as Readtopia, can open doors to learning about more new and exciting things.

*reel video linked below

(the synthesization of our long conversation was incredibly impressive! However some corrections are: 1) we use Readtopia, Readtopia GO is for elementary students 2) N used single words ‘and’ delayed echolalia when younger 3) N does not lean forward to correct answers but rather leans forward with rapt attention when viewing multi-media resources)

How Do You Know? (reel)

(Photo description: yellow wildflowers by a split rail wood fence near a field)

In my writing about how all communication counts, I wrote about how my nonspeaking teenager used a lyric from a children’s song in the Spotify app to communicate that he wanted to leave the house.

“Five little ducks went out one day, over the hill and far away.”

It is not surprising to me that he sometimes uses music and other rich colorful multi-media to communicate.

I have watched him grow up all these years, to see that he is a “creative”.

His artistic tendencies are reflected in the modalities that he uses to communicate.

His communication often fluctuates and changes, mirroring his need for novelty, to have new communication canvases to explore.

I share here about how he uses multimedia to communicate along with his delayed echolalia, the borrowed language from lots of sources.

However, the most primary way he expressively communicates is not through language but rather through embodied communication.

His embodied communication can look like splaying his fingers when he is happy, stomping his feet when he is angry, or even making different kinds of whistles when he is content or surprised.

Sometimes he uses his whole body to answer questions such as “do you want to go upstairs or to the basement?”. He just simply moves himself to his choice.

I would estimate that embodied communication encompasses 85-90% of his communication on a daily basis.

Language is important because it is currently the most common medium used to communicate in our society at large, but it is still the hardest for him to access.

In our home, we view all of his communication as incredibly valuable, no one modality is superior to the other.

Even so, that teeny 10-15% of his expressive echolalic language whether expressed through multimedia or by ‘mouth words’ is incredibly interesting.

His delayed echolalia (a.k.a. gestalt language) continues to develop and grow in unexpected ways, in ways that don’t go according to the plan of others.

I think his echolalic language development is like watching wildflowers grow vs. potted flowers grow.

Both can grow, and both have their own beauty.

Potted flowers grow to look clean, crisp, fairly predictable, and beautiful.

Wildflowers grow to look softly rough, unruly, spontaneous, and beautiful.

I recently watched some webinar sessions for a virtual early childhood education conference.

One of the sessions noted that while there are general stages of human growth and development that are common among all humans, each person will still have their own unique developmental path.

When we think of developmental milestones such as walking for those who do not have significant physical disabilities, the journey to develop the milestone of walking will greatly vary.

There will be differences in the timing of walking, the location of walking, and the style of walking from human to human.

Some humans will emerge cautiously walking with tentative steps while others will take off running.

As a teacher and a lifelong learner in the topic of human growth and development, I find it all fascinating.

I journaled my own baby’s growth and development as a way to scrapbook it as a keepsake.

It turned into an ongoing documentation for much longer than I thought because my child, whom we nicknamed N, did not quite follow the neatly arranged milestones named in the charts and books about child raising.

At 10 months old, he did begin pointing and saying words.

Around 18 months he jumped from exclusively saying single words to speaking in delayed echolalic phrases which was language borrowed from other people, books, and songs.

He had feeding challenges and new arising delays in motor skills which led to seeing an occupational therapist (OT) which was followed by seeing a speech language pathologist (SLP).

The SLP worked on trying to teach N to use short spontaneous and novel phrases during fun play activities.

His speech gradually became more unintelligible and then use of speech declined significantly which brought a diagnosis of autism at age 3.

By 4 years old, the SLP services were clearly not working for him.

I heard about a therapy clinic that solely used the SCERTS framework, which targets “social communication” to develop language. We went ahead and gave it a shot.

The SCERTS approach of utilizing high rates of social engagement in an attempt to launch language development was disastrously overstimulating and we had to pull out. SCERTS did not move his communication forward, instead it pushed it backwards.

In hindsight, we have come to understand that large amounts of intense face to face interaction and turntaking increases his overall sensory load to the point of distress. This distress was not apparent during the SCERTS based sessions, but rather very shortly afterwards.

N’s own profile of motor and cognitive disabilities actually necessitate much lower rates of social engagement that is parallel or ‘side by side’ with communication partners to be able to process language input, and then he needs even more time after that to then move his body in response.

Our doctors at the time had been pressuring us to pursue applied behavior analysis (ABA) services since N’s autism diagnosis, and we finally got health insurance that covered it.

We found a ‘modern ABA’ provider who was an ethical, compassionate person. She was a parent of teenagers, and a former public school teacher with many years of experience.

So we tried the Verbal Behavior (VB) and Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI) approaches with their environmental engineering strategies and “motivating” N through extrinsic means to develop language (aka “behavior modification”).

At our request, most of the ABA service hours took place at his play based nursery school. The goal there was to support inclusion within all aspects of the program. He engaged with painting, playing instruments, and digging in the mud alongside his same-age peers with the support of an ABA provider as a one on one aide.

He also had some time at home one on one with an ABA provider doing short bursts of direct instruction working on language skills with flashcards with lots of breaks in between to choose play activities where language was targeted in a more naturalistic and child led way.

After nearly two years of ABA, some boxes on the ABA assessment tool were checked off but there was no real authentic communication progress that translated to positive outcomes in everyday life.

We came to realize that N had a motor speech condition impacting his ability to speak. It was not simply a “social communication” problem nor a “motivation” problem.

Finally shortly before he was 6 years old he was diagnosed with apraxia of speech.

We found a local SLP private practice that actually had deep training and knowledge of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).

Our AAC SLP’s in that clinic were truly gems and we learned from their tremendous generosity with lots of coaching and resource sharing.

I attended AAC trainings and conferences to learn all I could.

I printed out low tech boards of the high tech AAC language system we accessed for N.

I printed, laminated, cut out, and velcroed hard copies of the pictures of individual icons from the high tech AAC language system to demonstrate with low tech how to combine words in novel ways and then mirrored how to find those combined words on the AAC device.

(Photo description: a low tech sentence strip with laminated words go, up, down)

There was high quality AAC device implementation in place with ample modeling, time for free exploration, space and opportunities were given to N to practice using language.

I was so ‘all in’ on supporting the AAC language system that I was affectionately dubbed an “AAC mom”.

Yet, N’s delayed echolalia would randomly ‘pop out’ out of the blue and he would speak an entire echolalic phrase that he’d heard in the past.

That language was often a lyric from a song, or language said by a familiar person repeated in the exact same intonation and cadence.

Back then I thought to myself, “well then, he just needs to know how to locate those words in the AAC language system and then he can express these echolalic phrases whenever he wants!”.

We continued to use the AAC device in daily routines. I even bought fun toys and created “pinterest” worthy activities to keep using language in fresh novel ways.

As time went on N seemed more and more confused, the chasm of his language use growing more scarce instead of abundant.

His silence had grown so loud that it was undeniable that something had gone terribly wrong.

Some may wonder why I embrace my son using echolalic language (a.k.a. gestalts), along with all the other ways he communicates.

Won’t that hold him back?

Won’t it stunt him?

Isn’t it sub-optimal?

Isn’t it a “crutch”?

Shouldn’t he be taught to use words in conventional ways?

For years, he was taught conventional ways to use language; to follow the predestined plans of others of how they thought his language development should be.

However, his language development is not a blank slate of nothingness. It never was.

The plans did not work because he already had language in his mind but was not able to consistently speak it from his mouth with speech.

He also could not carry the cognitive load and motor planning demands required to find and connect single words through pages of words contained in grid based columns and rows as commonly displayed in AAC language systems.

(Photo description: AAC app TouchChat Word Power 108 home screen, square grids and columns with many words and cartoon images)

His own echolalic language, borrowed from many sources, is already organized in his own mind.

It is organized according to his experiences, his emotions, his favorite melodies, and his visual memories, rather than by the fragmented squares of words paired with abstract cartoon icons in the AAC language systems.

He already had his own thoughts, and he had his own plans that better fit his preferences and strengths.

His plans are always better than what I, or others, could imagine

A few weeks had passed since he used a song lyric to communicate that he wanted to go out of the house.

“Five little ducks went out one day, over the hill and far away.”

I was sitting on the living room floor after doing some spring cleaning.

I had plans to kick my feet up and relax for the rest of the evening.

N came to the mudroom area by the front door, slipped his feet into his shoes, and stood in front of me expectantly.

I could perceive that this communication was likely a request to get out of the house once again, but I was hoping I was mistaken because I was quite tired.

It had also been quite a number of days since I had heard him express himself with speech.

I asked, “what do you need?”.

I asked him this question, knowing that he would likely take my hand and simply lead me to what he wanted.

I continued to look up at him.

There was a pause of silence.

N (spoke with his mouth): “Go!”

His unexpected spoken utterance took me back in time, to the past.

N first said “Go!” at 18 months old.

At 20 months old, he said the phrase “here you go!”, as well as a conjugation of the word “go” with his excited exclamation of “all gone!”.

A month later, he toddled around the house saying “Go Train Go!” which was the title of a Thomas the Train book he loved at the time.

At 2 ½ years old he loved our trips to the Lowes hardware store, he would pace around the room while reciting “go to Lowes” again and again.

He’d also used a second conjugation of the word “go” one day after I entered the room. He said, “what’s going on?” (go+ing). We did not hear him say that language again until a decade later.

When he was 3 ½, I had an outpatient surgical procedure and he had come with us to drop me off at the medical plaza in the early hours of the morning.

His dad got the call to come pick me up in the late afternoon.

N was in the living room, engrossed in an episode of a children’s tv show.

His dad stood by the door and called out, ”we gotta go pick up mom!”.

N looked at his dad, then back at the television.

Then he made an emotionally decisive move; he stood up to walk towards the door to go out into the car.

Thereafter, we heard him say from time to time, “we gotta go pick up mom!”.

Other than that, N was not using the word “go”, or any other expressive speech in any consistent way.

When he got his high tech AAC device at nearly 6 years old, we showed him the word go.

He explored the word “Go” on his own.

I often heard the flat synthesized voice flowing from the device as he repetitively pushed that icon.

“Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go”.

However, even though we had heard him speak with his mouth conjugations of the word “go” such as with “all gone” and “what’s going on?”, the AAC language system required two button hits to conjugate the word “go” (go+ing, go+ed etc.).

This multi-step process to communicate with language became a huge barrier to N’s language development. His significant cognitive and motor planning disabilities made it challenging for him to access grammar in AAC language systems by selecting single word by single word to build up phrases.

Years had gone by in trying to use the high tech AAC language system, it got to the point where the device was slowly being pushed away.

It was not simply an AAC “buy-in” problem, it was not an AAC implementation problem.

It was a huge mismatch between the echolalic language he already had organized in his own mind and the cognitive as well as motor demands of accessing the organizational and grammatical layouts in the AAC language system.

He did not make any progress with the grid layout icon based AAC system, and it was not a failure on his part.

It was our failure to truly meet his individual needs.

It did not mean that the AAC device should have never been given to him, nor that it should be taken away from him, but rather we needed to stop trying to bend him to fit with a traditional AAC language system and to pivot to other more personalized AAC options that actually opened doors to communication rather than shutting it out.

In January of 2020, when he was 9 years old, I had learned about a different way to support delayed echolalic language (a.k.a gestalt language development) that I had not been aware of which was based on the clinical research by speech language therapist Marge Blanc.

Since past therapy expectations for supporting language development had not been helpful, I gradually let go of nudging him to generate unpredictable “novel” utterances to focus on being more responsive to the language that he wanted to hear the most and engage with.

I found that he loved longer, consistently patterned, emotionally resonant, and melodic sounding strings of language.

I sang language from his favorite children’s songs into our everyday life, while brushing his teeth.

”This is the way we brush our teeth so early in the morning”

And watching summer rainstorms.

”It’s raining it’s pouring the old man is snoring”

It felt exactly the same as when he was young, before we fell into the world of pathologizing models of language development where echolalia is inconsistently viewed as communicative but is also seen as something to move past rather than attuning to it..

Becoming attuned to N’s echolalia was like going back home, to a familiar place.

It was a great relief for both of us to push aside the clutter of modeling a constantly revolving door of “novel” language to make room for the language that mattered the most to N.

Nearly a year later, in December of 2020, for the first time in forever N verbally spoke the word “go”.

Except, “go” was not a stand alone word, or a phrase with a “subject + verb”.

Instead the word “go” was inside of an entire gestalt phrase.

He exclaimed, ”Here it goes!”, while putting a piece into a puzzle.

Furthermore, the expression of the word ‘go’ was a completely new conjugation (go+es).

The year 2021 brought the gestalt in the form of a question, “where did it go!?”.

And then another gestalt was spoken that was a hint that it was time to eat, “mommy’s gonna make dinner” (‘gonna’ is a contraction meaning ‘going to’).

The year 2022 brought a gestalt for social conventions, “how’s it going?”.

Then a remix of an echolalic gestalt from nearly decade before “go to Lowes” was transformed to “go to________”.

”Go to bed” (when we were driving to a park)

”Go to the left” (from song ‘The Gold Fish: Let’s Go Swimming”)

”Go to the doctor” (while getting his temperature taken)

The year 2022 ended up being a very remarkable year.

On his own, he began to break off single words from his echolalic phrases.

It is a common guidance when supporting gestalt language development to model ‘whole’ or complete salient phrases, that when chosen to be acquired by a person, can eventually be easily mixed and matched to communicate different ideas.

One popular phrase that children who primarily use gestalt language often pick up on as a gestalt is, “Let’s _____”. It is a great piece of language that has such powerful potential for self advocacy.

Many years prior, I had documented N speaking the echolalic language “Let’s go back to bed”. So I re-introduced that language consistently and modeled remixing it in everyday life.

Since he cannot consistently access speech with his mouth , the remixed gestalt phrase “Let’s go upstairs” was programmed into a high tech AAC visual scene display (VSD) about his bedtime routine.

VSD’s, which are not talked about enough, are a research based form of AAC which attaches language to a picture of a particular moment in time.

(Photo description: a screenshot of a visual scene display of a person specific bedtime routine, a large picture of a twin bed is surrounded by person specific gestalt phrases such as “it’s time for bed”, “let’s go upstairs”, and “family hug”)

I consistently used that language, “let’s go upstairs”, whenever it was time to head up for bed.

He explored that language in the AAC device whenever he wanted, which was quite often.

One dark night he quietly spoke out a piece of that gestalt language from his mouth, “Upstairs”.

A single word pulled off from echolalia.

In 2023, another change came, this time that language “Let’s go upstairs”, was spoken with speech but was pared down to a more generic application, “Let’s go!”.

While I do not believe that N had zero understanding the meaning of the individual words in his echolalic phrases, I do speculate that because echolalia is a very consistent language. His understanding of the different meanings of words and how words worked together within his echolalia simply crystalized and became clearer over time.

I also speculate that when N saw his echolalia written out visually exactly as he intended, all at once, as a ‘whole’ gestalt in the visual scene displays of his AAC device, he could self-study them to better see and hear the word boundaries.

He could see the auditory sound stream of, “Let’sgoupstairs”, in written form actually looked like “Let’s go upstairs” thus making it easier to parse out the single words within that phrase.

Engaging with his echolalia released him to be free to have language organized in a way that was cognitively and motorically consistent and accessible to him.

Some of his echolalia could be universally copied and pasted to any new experiences, so I began using this echolalia to communicate whenever it seemed right such as:

Look at that! (2018)

Here it goes! (2020)

How’s it going? (2021)

That’s what it’s all about! (2022) -from song “Hokey Pokey”

The echolalic language that he loved most often had consistent beginnings. This made it easier for N to access language whether by mouth or selecting that language in a visual scene display (VSD).

Below are some examples of his echolalic language with consistent beginnings.

(Note, I have included some documented echolalia with consistent beginnings from before I learned about how to support gestalt language development in 2020. He expressed delayed echolalia way back then, but we were so focused on him generating novel utterances via mouth words, then by an AAC device, that his language did not get the support it needed to grow)

1. We gotta go pick up mom! (2014)

2. Look at the blue hair. (2018) (referencing Toca Hair Salon app)

3. Sounds like an elephant! (2018) (in reference to a squeaky chair)

4. There’s the bus! (2020) (video wheels on the bus)

I also began showing him through everyday interactions how to remix (or “mitigate”) this echolalic language.

“We gotta go pick up mom!” could be changed just a little bit to fit a new experience, “We gotta go outside!” or “We gotta go eat dinner!”.

The changes in his emotional affect were almost immediate, he showed me through his embodied communication the language he loved most. Four months after his gestalt language development began to be supported, he slowly started using echolalic speech via mouth words again a few times a day.

(see numbered list above for the original echolalic language that corresponds with the remixed echolalic language below)

1. We gotta go trick or treat (2022) (referencing going out at night)

2. Look at the bug (2021) (looking at a picture book)

3. Sounds like a horse (2021) (playing with AAC device animal sounds)

4. There’s the fire station! (2022) (referencing a photo of Lowes lawnmowers)

The consistency of his own echolalic language gave a placeholder, a frame of reference similar to a mnemonic device to help his language to grow by simply removing a language chunk or word and then slotting in another language chunk or word.

(a mnemonic device is a learning technique that uses a memory strategy that associates information to something that is easier to remember or recall such as memorizing a loved ones new phone number or address by incorporating it with a familiar melody or rhyme)

The frame and slot style of recommended language support for early gestalt language development, particularly as described in the clinical work of speech language therapist Marge Blanc, also reminds me of a few literacy strategies included in the literacy framework for students with cognitive disabilities, Comprehensive Literacy for All (CFLA): 1) reading predictable text, 2) predictable chart writing, and 3) the keyword and word wall approach

There are many books with predictable text, or language, but one widely known early childhood example would be author Eric Carle’s “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?”.

In the CFLA book (2020) it talks about how predictable text helps students make sense of what they are reading. When reading predictable text, students “gain sensitivity to text structure, acquire vocabulary, and participate more readily and successfully” (p.128).

Then with predictable chart writing, students can also learn to recognize sentence structures by writing with sentence stems where a predictable chunk of language is given and a student can fill in the rest. This activity can be extended further by completing other steps of predictable chart writing routines such as cutting apart the sentence and then reconstructing it (p.81).

(Photo description: Six pages of a homemade book of predictable chart writings for the month of February are shown. Sentence stems are Love is___, I love my___, Put ____in the cup, Porcupines have____, Snow is_____.)

Prior to knowing about gestalt language development, I had used predictable text and predictable chart writing with N in our homeschool. He did and still does enjoy being supported to engage in these types of literacy activities,

Another strategy used for reading and writing that can be helpful for students with cognitive disabilities is the “keyword’ approach (p.171) and referencing word walls.

The keyword approach can be used when students have had ample time interacting with the alphabet and with word families (-at family: cat, bat, fat, hat). Then they can readily learn to recognize the patterns of words and use a keyword that is visually posted on a “word wall” as a reference point to make a new word that has a similar pattern.

For example, a student might want to write the word “CAKE” but struggles with writing the word completely from scratch. If a similar word such as “MAKE” is displayed on a word wall, a student can see that they can swap the initial letter “M” out and put in the letter “C” to make the new word “CAKE”.

I learned from CFLA that predictable language and text can leverage access to literacy for people with cognitive disabilities.

However, it had not occurred to me to apply using predictable language that N loved as an everyday conversational strategy to support his language development.

Having access to a predictable consistent language, through his own echolalia, has helped his language (and literacy!) to continue to grow. He can better recognize language structures, build vocabulary, and participate in conversations.

He went on to speak the conjugated word ‘go’ in other echolalic phrases.

“Where you going?” (caregiver walking away)

“It goes squish squish” (sound effect of walking in mud)

As he became a teenager, I looked over the small language sample collected, not over a 60 minute session, but rather over the course of years.

I noticed generally with his language that conjugations of verbs, such as with the word “go”, were developing.

However, his conjugations of verbs all happened within the spaces of his echolalic phrases.

Back then, I pondered over the fact that he had expressed the words go, gone, going, goes and gonna, but curiously the past tense conjugation of “went” was absent.

In 2024 and 2025, there was a big drop in spoken and multimedia language use that was concurrent with a huge uptick in embodied communication.

In those two years, he expressed a small amount of spoken echolalic gestalts but none contained the word “go”.

When N does use spoken echolalic language it has different purposes for him.

It is a way for him to explore language, rehearse language, recall past experiences, ask questions, express feelings, and to express some of the things on his mind.

For him, this spoken language typically comes out unexpectedly.

It comes hours, days, months, or years later from the original time he’d first heard it.

Yet, spoken language has not been a primary form of expressive communication for him since the age of 3 years old.

That is why we have leaned into a comprehensive total communication approach, where language is just one part of his many communication modalities.

All communication is honored equally, even communication without words at all.

If words come, that is awesome, if they don’t that is okay too because words aren’t the only way to communicate.

In 2026, now aged 15, another spoken gestalt with the word “go” quietly emerged.

“Are we gonna go?” (while transitioning to another activity).

Just a couple months later came the song replays on Spotify to indicate that he wanted to go out of the house.

“Five little ducks went out one day, over the hill and far away”

I remembered later that he had expressed through delayed echolalia all the conjugations of the words: go, gone, going, goes, gonna.

And now the word ‘went’ had subtly emerged through a song he played from a tablet.

N has been exposed to the word “went” many, many times over his lifetime.

I don’t know that he had ever used that word to communicate a thought.

Perhaps he did, and no one noticed or realized it?

All I know for sure is that his echolalic language is deepening, evolving, and growing over time.

Now back to the living room in 2026.

N had gotten his shoes on and was expectantly standing in front of me.

Me: “what do you need?”

A pause of silence.

N (speaking with his mouth): Go!

Me (stammering in surprise): Go!?….where?”

A pause of silence.

N (speaking with his mouth): Go….out!

It was a spontaneous extraction of words from his large bank of his echolalic language.

Echolalia is a beloved language that he has collected deep into his soul. It is language bonded to his lifetime of meaningful and emotional experiences.

“Go to Lowes.”

“We gotta go pick up mom.”

“Let’s go upstairs”

”Let’s go”

“Here it goes!”

“Where did it go?”

”5 little ducks went out one day”

(along with many, many more acquired echolalic gestalts over the years that have not been mentioned here)

And then one evening, the extracted words came forth spontaneously and organically, ”Go out!”.

His unexpected, unplanned communication gave me renewed energy to get up, put on my own shoes, and let him lead me to where he wanted to go.

This world has ideas of how his language should grow, but his disabled body cannot meet those demands.

Echolalia is the language that he has, a rich language interwoven with a lifetime of memories, and we choose to empower him to use the language he has to the absolute fullest.

For the last 6 years, instead of trying to dump water on and prune back the leaves of his echolalic language, I now stand back and watch it stretch out to the sky.

I embrace the majestic view of his wonderfully unruly and wild language that belongs only to him.

And we went out that day,

over the hill,

and far away.

(Photo visual description: (taken back in 2022, a tween boy is confidently reaching up to the sky with his hand. At this time, he was just beginning to pull words out of his echolalia to communicate, while simultaneously still acquiring new echolalia. Here he had been humming the melody of a new to him song “Best Day of My Life” by American Authors, “I had a dream so big and loud, I jumped so high I touched the clouds, I stretched my hands to the sky”)

(photo description: screenshot from Spotify app of song “Five Little Duck”, yellow ducks are walking across the grass)

In years past, the focus for disability supports was weighted towards the idea that my nonspeaking son would be ‘taught’ to communicate according to the plan of others.

In 2020, I learned a different way to support my son’s delayed echolalic language (gestalt language) by honoring it as full communication.

This echolalia is a language that is “borrowed” from the environment, a line from a song, a book, or a comment overheard.

It is a language that can be nurtured rather than something to push through.

I first began changing how I talked to him, moving away from diverse short sentences that I had been taught to do.

It appeared that he wasn’t listening to me in the beginning, with his pacing and walking about.

Over months, it gradually became apparent that he was noticing my offerings of predictable streams of language, when his fleeting glances came my way.

The language I offered him was infused with bits of language from songs he loved and familiar family sayings.

Then he began to occasionally repeat the familiar patterned language he heard, sometimes hours, days, and months later.

At one point about two years in, he began to randomly verbalize some delayed echolalic gestalts, up to 10 times in a day.

Many of those gestalts were also audio-recorded and video recorded with the familiar voices of loved ones into his high tech AAC device so he could explore them anytime he wanted.

I managed to randomly catch two of his spoken gestalts in home videos. Those were programmed into the alternative augmentative communication (AAC) device so he could hear his own voice too.

Then we heard his rare spoken words directly pulled from those gestalts, and even rarer, a new combination of those words.

At that point, we tried once again with using icon based AAC vocabulary, in the conventional way, so that he might communicate more often, and according to the plan of others.

In meaningful moments, I tried sensitively showing him in the AAC language system again how to pull up a word and combine it with another word to make self generated phrases.

His responses to this renewed conventional AAC modeling were mostly neutral; he had seen it before many times in the past.

He expressly preferred, if using high tech AAC, using his programmed videoclips and on his recreational ipad songs to communicate.

Then he hit his teens.

The physical changes of growing up and health challenges caused him to become quieter.

He pushed away his high tech AAC, and then pushed away his recreational ipad.

One day he even put his AAC ipad and recreational ipad on a shelf out of my reach.

I respected his decision to not use high tech technologies because AAC is fundamentally not just an electronic tablet, or even just using “words”.

In the same circles where I read about how to support delayed echolalic language, it led me to information in other circles about supporting more expansive communication, particularly for people with physical and/or intellectual disabilities.

Through that learning, I worked on strengthening my observations and responses to N’s expressive communication that was not words, but rather “embodied” communication.

This has helped keep N’s confidence as a communicator going, and with people consistently showing up, listening, and responding he becomes a stronger communicator every day.

His health challenges have now stabilized with daily medical intervention, and he feels better.

All the learning I did in the spaces where communication and intellectual disabilities were openly discussed, it gradually began to lay bare something that was in the back of my mind.

It was a growing understanding that N had cognitive disabilities, and those had not ever been ‘officially’ addressed nor supported, and needed to be.

So, this realization along with many other additional reasons, we decided to get N evaluated to see if he had an intellectual disability.

He does indeed have an intellectual disability.

We don’t see his intellectual disability as “bad” or somehow “inferior”, it is just a part of who he is.

It also helps better plan for supports, adaptations, and accommodations that he needs to access communication, education, and to thrive in life especially as he grows into adulthood.

Recently, we had some inclement weather and N was restless.

I got on a stepstool and pulled the recreational ipad from off the high shelf where he put it.

I pulled up the Spotify app, and offered it to him for listening to music.

He was happy to oblige and let the melodies soothe him.

A couple days later, with a refreshed interest in the recreational ipad he was listening to Spotify and played the children’s song “5 Little Ducks” on repeat.

”Five little ducks went out one day, over the hill and far away.”

Sometimes when he plays media on repeat, it can mean he is thinking about something in particular.

I paid attention to the little colorful video display for the song with little yellow ducks walking in the outdoors.

I leaned over and listened to the song with him, and softly sang along.

Then I got to singing along with the words, “went out one day”.

Right then, N looked up at me with a prolonged fixed eye gaze, and then quickly went to get his shoes.

This embodied communication in response to the language in the song made it clear that he was ready to go out!

It was a beautiful afternoon so I took out a photo album that we use for low-tech communication.

I opened the photo album and asked “shall we go to (-name of the park-)?”

(photo description: a cover of a 4x6 photo album with the caption, “Outdoor Places”, the photo shows a teen boy watching a waterfall at a park)

He looked at the photo and tapped it.

This tapping with his hand on choices given is his indication of “yes”.

When his answer is no, he will push it away, or remain still and silent.

If he had pushed it away, or remained silent, I would just flipped to the next photo, and then the next, until he selected the one he wanted.

We went to the chosen park.

He enjoyed watching some sprinklers, and of course some ducks too.

(photo description: a teen boy outside watching the sprinklers water the grass)

Some may think that using a children’s counting song to communicate is too simple and rudimentary for a teenager.

However, all of N’s communications are wonderfully layered and reflect his own preferences, strengths, creativity, and abilities.

Some people say that N’s communications don’t count, and try to steer him to how they want him to communicate.

N clearly wants his communication to count, he has always wanted it to count (and no one listened for a very long time).

He wants to count it all!

His use of the image of ducks walking outside is communication.

The idea from the song of a mother and a child outdoors together, is communication.

The peppy rhythm of the music conveying the energy of walking at a quick pace is communication.

The words, the printed text from the song convey, “went out one day”, “over the hill”, and “far away” are communication.

His embodied communications, the fixed eye gaze, and the using his hands to tap a photo to indicate a, “yes, that is what I want!”, are communication.

The use of his shoes as an ‘object of reference’ to request leaving the house is communication.

The use of a photo album with partner assisted scanning to clarify where he wanted to go is communication.

And there are people who will still insist that it does not count, that it is “sub-optimal” or “unreliable”.

But N knows this about himself all too well:

His communication is complete and whole, and creative, it is spontaneous, it is optimal, it is complex, it is reliable for him.

And it all counts.

Love can be hard to find in a world where hatred resides.

Perhaps it is easier to hastily judge and condemn than it is to take time to hold space for the unknown and different.

Back when N was 11 years old, I wore new pajamas that had cursive text on them.

N, curious, leaned over and looked at it closely.

I touched the words and read them aloud, “hugs and kisses”.

He tapped at the words himself with an open hand.

I spoke again, “hugs and kisses.”

Only that time I playfully pulled him into a bear hug. 

He giggled and then tapped at the text again.

So I hugged him again.

We did this several times over, building memories with connection and multimodal communication.

Some might say his communication is not really valid unless he gestures or uses facial expressions in prescribed ways.

Or that he should speak the words.

Or that he should select icons within an AAC language system.

Or that he should spell it out letter by letter.

I have learned over time, especially with so many “intervention” failures, to shut out all the noise and just anchor all my interactions with him in unconditional love.

I now look up at a grown boy who used to look up at me.

He asserts his autonomy and spreads his wings, making up his own mind on the kinds of communication modalities he wants to use.

His long arms recently placed the basket holding both his high tech AAC device and recreational ipad up on a high shelf. 

A shelf that I can’t reach without a stepstool.

His bold decision was made.

All of his no-tech, low-tech, mid-tech AAC, and alternative pencils are still accessible and very well within reach.

AAC can be everywhere, continually evolving, and is not encapsulated into just one methodology and/or tool. 

He will find no judgement or condemnation here, instead he will find time, space, and love for whatever communication he wants to use to connect with us.

Long ago, all the way back to infancy N loved books.

His hyperlexia was evident before he could crawl.

Sometimes I would lay him on his tummy and prop a picture book in front of him and he would tap at it with his little fist.

Later I found these sets of mini-board books that were about 2-3 inches in diameter.

As soon as he could open those tiny books with his little baby hands, he was hooked, and spent a lot of time looking through them.

We read aloud to him all the time too.

Often, as a toddler, he would re-read the books aloud in the exact same tone, cadence, and intonation he had first heard them read. It was super adorable.

His most loved books were books with letters, strong musical content, or a very patterned rhythm.

Then when he was close to 4 years old he stopped looking at books and enjoying being read to.

It felt like a tremendous loss of connection that we once had, a shared love of books together.

This sheer dislike of books went on for years and years. Nearly a decade.

I tried **everything** to see if we could get back his love of reading books.

I tried offering new books, presenting old books in new ways, books read on video, digital books, audiobooks, books with lift the flaps, books with audiobutton sound effects, scanimation picture books, pop-up picture books. more variations of song books, fiction books, nonfiction books, and chapter books.

He might tolerate a page or two of a book. With the digital books he wanted to listen to just one page over and over again.

While trying to offer a lot of opportunities to interact with books, I ensured that we had a literacy rich environment in our home with a lot of “real-life” reading together.

Reading recipes to cook a yummy snack, reading a sign at a community park, reading the directions for a science experiment, looking at the world map hung up on the wall, and turning on the subtitles/captioning to tv programming.

When he was nine we gradually let go of all the longtime unsuccessful language “intervention” expectations to lean more into the language he most wanted to hear and use, which was delayed echolalia of mostly musical nature.

Close to the age of 12 years old, even though he seldom speaks due to apraxia of speech, the spoken echolalic language he had naturally acquired began to mature. He had a fairly short spurt where from time to time he began to pull single words out of his delayed echoes (gestalts) and combine them.

I kept offering books during this period too, with no success.

One day when he was 13, I ran across a colorful photographic board book about Sesame Street’s Count Von Count.

He had a favorite DVD featuring Count Von Count that he watched on the regular.

N also has an affinity for ‘spooky’ themes, trending from Count Von Count to Scooby Doo cartoons to Harry Potter movies.

I set down the Count Von Count book near him one day and walked away.

At first, he pretended to ignore it.

I discreetly watched from across the room as the book figuratively called out to him and he leaned over to look at the cover.

Eventually over days, he began to open then close this book.

One afternoon I asked if I could read it aloud. He quietly obliged.

I read the first page of brightly colored enlarged text aloud, then another, and then another.

Until the end of the book.

We actually read a whole book!

Hours later, near bedtime, he punctuated the silence with his deepened voice, “I……..”

followed by a cadenced spoken phrase ”read a book!”

(he pronounced the word ‘read’ in present tense pronounced r-ee-d)

Yes, he surely did!

I ended up getting him more board books about the other Sesame Street characters.

We read all of those.

Gradually over time, we found more books he liked.

Snoopy comic books, Disney movie picture books, and nonfiction early reader books with their crystal clear photographs.

One day when he was nearly 14 years old, I stumbled upon a very beginner chapter book at a thrift store about a topic that I thought he might like, titled “Hungry Plants”. There was more text to read than he was used to, but it still had substantial colorful illustrations to look at.

We read a chapter together, then another, then another until we read the whole thing.

I found another beginner chapter book of a similar format called “Spooky and Spookier”. We read that together too.

I remembered around that time that there was a literature based curriculum for AAC users based on the literacy framework “Comprehensive Literacy for All”, called Readtopia.

Years earlier, when I first saw Readtopia, N still hated reading books so I felt that it was not a good option at that time.

With his renewed interest in reading books, I took a leap of faith this fall and purchased access to Readtopia as a resource to start our new journey with homeschooling high school.

We started with a smaller book unit featuring an adapted version of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Gold Bug”.

N loved the creepy pirate lore! He studied the pictures and his eyes followed my finger as I ran it across the story text.

I did not worry about his *not* wanting to use grid-icon based AAC tools as a way to interact with the book reading activities.

With all of his wide range of nonlinguistic communications he expressed approval, disapproval, and excitement with the story.

Additionally, similar to using AAC “activity based pages” or “topic pages” with grid based icons, which can be a valuable communication strategy or tool to pull from a comprehensive AAC toolbox, I created text based “topic pages”.

In a grid-icon based activity or topic page there might be core words (it, the, like, and) and fringe words (nouns) related to a specific activity (e.g. a board game) collected altogether on one single page to make it more efficient to communicate when participating within these particular activities without having to navigate through multiple pages to access vocabulary.

For our text-based topic pages I created word lists with pens and paper showing the vocabulary that was related to the literature assignments. He would point to or circle the words he wanted to express.

We then worked on applying the synthetic phonics knowledge that we have covered to add the word to writing activities. Sometimes I transcribed the words he chose and sometimes he practiced typing them, with help (gesture cues, modeling), into his label maker machine.

At age 15 years old, we ventured next to an adapted graphic novel unit, a piece of horror genre, “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley.

This kind of book was right up his alley.

It took us a bit over a couple months to get through the book unit, which had additional related short science or social studies articles to read, related videos, and math activities.

We ended up tweaking some of the Readtopia “quizzes” and “assessments” in favor of more of a project based “scrapbooking” approach to track his learning.

When we finished the novel, I showed N how to organize all of his completed work with the Frankenstein book: the math projects, the articles, the video assignments etc.

I showed him the piles of his work and asked what part of doing the Frankenstein novel unit was his favorite.

He tapped at the video assignment pile. (….the Readtopia videos truly are excellent!)

So there you have it!

My favorite part of Readtopia is the availability of age relevant literature that is adapted into plain language of varying levels. Many adults with intellectual disability have expressed how plain language gives them better access to information. These adapted texts give N access to literature in such a way that he can participate in and enjoy great age relevant stories.

Something I have come to learn with raising a multiply disabled, nonspeaking autistic human, is that leaning into uncertainty has been such a life giving direction to move in (though this is still very much a work in progress for me).

His development is just in a different dimension of time with lots of unexpected twists and turns.

The love of reading books has returned. It is still not something N can do on his own as he does not independently motor plan the sequence to read a page, turn the page, read another page, and turn the page until the book is completed.

And that is okay because reading books is something I can do with him, as a now teenager, to learn new things, share ideas, ask questions, seek knowledge, and form opinions.

It is a wild journey, but N is continually teaching me that I can just hold on and enjoy what comes today and let tomorrow unfold however it will.

I have radical appreciation for who he is and who he becomes.

It is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

There is a resurgence in promoting autism treatments or autism interventions, some even with a bit of virtue signaling about which one is “better”.

I want to plead with you here to rethink promoting “autism therapy” or “autism interventions” altogether.

Autism is much too complex to flatten it to fit one therapy model whether that is ABA, Naturalistic Developmental Behavior Interventions (NDBI), or Developmental Relationship Based Interventions (DRBI).

My multiply disabled nonspeaking autistic son was harmed by ALL of these kinds of interventions.

Even “nice” or “gentle” looking autism “treatments” can disrupt natural family interactions, cause family distress, and pressure participation in unnecessary implementations of one size fits all therapy models because society pressures them to do so.

Promoting reductionist autism intervention models siphons resources away from specialists such as SLP, OT, PT, educators, mental health professionals, and medical specialists to listen deeply to their autistic clients/patients and centering their specific needs.

Specific needs that desperately need to be addressed may fall outside of the categorical and hierarchical autism intervention models.

We cannot definitely say that autism intervention, of any kind, is harmless.

We are in dire need to have open dialog about how interventions **can harm** no matter the theoretical foundation it is set upon (behavioral, behavioral + developmental, or developmental).

There was a 2023 research meta-analysis conducted and published on autism interventions to include a lot of common interventions such as ABA, NDBI, and DRBI. They concluded:

***“We are unable to weigh the potential benefits of any intervention against the potential for unintended negative consequences because most researchers are not adequately monitoring and reporting adverse events.”***

[Article: (2023) Autism intervention meta-analysis of early childhood studies (Project AIM): updated systematic review and secondary analysis, Michael Sandbank et al.]

These research findings have come over a decade too late for us.

I am a parent.

I am not here to sell you anything.

I do, however, want to tell you everything so that no one else has to experience harm.

All the families, and all of our very much needed “helping professionals”, should be aware.

“Autism intervention packages” have great potential to harm autistic people no matter the theoretical background.

I know this to be true because they hurt my nonspeaking child and my family.

It was completely unintended, none of the therapists were “bad” therapists. They were all collectively very experienced, kind, and sincere.

Yet, harm did happen.

I think it is too easy to dismiss our written story, that maybe I am exaggerating, or giving an inaccurate description, or even spreading misinformation.

In light of this resurgence in platforming interventions without disclosures of potential harm, I have made a decision that I do not take lightly, to open a small window into our lives so you can see it for yourselves.

I am not a professional content creator and this is raw home video footage from the past.

I encourage you to watch the whole 15 minutes even though it may feel uncomfortable or may even appear to you to look like, “just autism”.

Wait for the last part, to see how things changed dramatically when the “interventions” were removed.

It wasn’t “just autism”, or entirely the neurobiological impact of autism regressions.

It was autistic distress.

I did not see this while we were in the thick of it.

I knew something wasn’t right but I did not fully understand why until much later, after the damage had been done and we were already on our path to healing.

Harm does not always look like bruises or flowing tears.

It can look like silence, avoidance, loss of previously developed abilities, ignoring others, avoiding eye contact, wanting to be alone, looking spaced out, flat facial expression, lack of progress and more.

Autistic distress can look quite like “just autism”, which makes it so hard to detect much to the peril of a child’s emotional well being and family connectedness.

Many autistic adults have warned against autism treatments or autism interventions for a very, very long time.

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) does not endorse “any one kind of therapy” but they do call for therapy to “help autistic people get what they want, not what other people think we need”.

I have heard some people say that the standard for autistic people leading the way for their therapies is different for nonspeakers, that they need more intensive hours of interventions and/or they really can’t tell you what they need the most.

I am letting you know that this is not true. An autistic person does not have to have “words” or conventional expressions of language to tell you what they need.

I hope that you can see that too, that nonspeakers can use nonlinguistic means to communicate to you what matters most to them.

This video linked below is put together in a very imperfect way with my clunky technology skills, but it is our lived experience, our story.

Our story matters, all autistic people matter.

P.S. please see the invaluable and rich resources in the video description, especially if you feel lost for ‘next steps’ with either accessing disability support services for your loved one or as a professional trying to improve disability services for your clients/patients

(Thank you to my friends who gave me some of the words I needed and that I have “borrowed” to tell our story. I want to especially express gratitude for my friend Shubha Bala -blog for modeling bravery for me and then having my back. And for reminding me that speaking up “is for the kids”.)

Video: Breaking Free From Autism and Language Interventions to Restore Connect for One Autistic Child

As we near the end of the year 2025 there is a recent resurgence in promoting ‘evidence based’ autism treatments and autism intervention.

Autism treatments run the gamut from behavioral (ABA), to a mix of developmental-behavioral (NDBI), and to developmental (DRBI).

ABA= applied behavior analysis

NDBI= ABA + Developmental

DRBI= Developmental Relationship Based Intervention

We have a lot of personal experience with all of those in both private therapy settings and school settings.

The different autism treatment models, frameworks, and methodologies all claim they are harmless.

They argue about who is more effective, noble, and better than the others.

Yet, they all carry the same risk.

Autism is a very complex permanent neurodevelopmental condition.

This condition has an extremely wide range in how it presents in each individual person.

Some people are autistic with co-occurring genetic conditions, epilepsy, sleep disorders, dyspraxia, nonspeaking, other disabilities and so much more. So much more.

While they may carry the same diagnosis, the needs of each unique autistic person are so different.

It is the same with other developmental disabilities such as cerebral palsy.

Cerebral palsy presents so differently, sometimes drastically, across people who live with it.

Some can walk and talk, some cannot.

Some have cognitive disabilities, some do not.

And, there is no singular “cerebral palsy treatment”.

The supports for people with cerebral palsy are going to vary depending on specific needs.

Yet, autism is somehow distinctive with the popular idea that a singular autism treatment will unequivocally meet the needs of all autistic people?

Still, when my child was young I trusted far too much and fell for the slick marketing not once, but multiple times.

It has taken a long time to process what happened, and I am still processing it.

I want to fully disclose that there was never overt abuse involved.

Nobody yelled, hit, slapped, or shocked.

No one was forcing compliance.

I would never have stood for that.

Everyone was kind. So kind.

Their treatment models had different names with different underlying theories, yet they all had the same core goal of eliciting and increasing neuronormative social skills and joint attention.

Our biggest concerns for our autistic child were, and still are, supporting motor skills, sensory processing challenges, expressive language, medical needs, and access to education.

It does not matter if social communication is not a primary concern of a family because the experts behind the autism treatment models decide that it is.

It initially seems benign to try to engineer more social opportunities to share eye gaze, to create the appearance of shared activities for longer periods of time, to point, to use communication and language in certain prescribed ways.

Until I realized a bit too late that trauma doesn’t always come from overt abuse, it can come from being repeatedly overlooked because of the distraction of following a set template of a singular treatment model.

When using a singular comprehensive autism model or framework to address the needs of a very broad group of people, someone will lose out,

Every time, someone will lose.

To add insult to injury, if an autistic person’s needs are not actually being met within a singular one size fits all treatment model they can get perpetually stuck because there is nowhere else to go except for the set hierarchal template.

For example if a nonspeaking autistic person cannot master sharing eye gaze, pointing, or using neurotypical gestures they may not get access to robust language supports, literacy, and education.

They may lose opportunities, such as being in their natural communities because they never really graduate from these treatments.

If families decide to step away from the singular autism treatment models they will have to search for supports all over again, completely from scratch.

It can leave families in the lurch searching for therapy providers for months. Ask me how I know.

Additionally, if an autistic child does not thrive with an autism treatment or model it is not allowed to be spoken about openly.

Families must bear it in silence otherwise they are accused of sowing discord.

Transparency about adverse effects is prohibited while professionals and experts pat themselves on the back for their job well done.

Leaving autism treatments, autism interventions, autism models, autism frameworks behind was the best decision we ever made.

Now we continually work towards radical acceptance of our autistic child with multiple disabilities.

We seek out supports that don’t require him to act like someone he is not.

I draw specific targeted supports broadly recommended by people with ADHD, intellectual disabilities, sensory processing disabilities, physical disabilities and more.

We embrace and appreciate his autistic communication.

I relish celebrating his ‘atypical’ and autistic developmental milestones that come in their own individual timeline.

It is almost 2026.

Yes we need to ensure insurance coverage for services, to make attempts at practicing harm reduction, but we also need to acknowledge that no autism treatment model is completely harmless.

We need to be honest and transparent.

Let’s allow open discussion of the pros and cons of all supports so professionals and families can make the most informed decisions they can.

We can’t afford to keep pulling back to outdated ideas such as the concept of autism treatments and interventions.

We need to ensure that the autistic people have access to calibrated supports with mental health counselors, educators, therapists, and disability support professionals who understand disability rights as well as pulling from a broad range of support strategies instead of throwing all autistic people into one basket.

I am grateful to those of you who listen to our ‘one’ story with an open mind and not dismissively waving us away.

Let’s truly move forward to make the world safer for every single autistic person because every single autistic person matters.

My nonspeaking multiply disabled son is a GLP and phonics has helped him tremendously in his literacy journey.

He is only one person, but he is not the only one GLP who has benefited from phonics instruction.

As many of you may already know, GLP is the acronym for the term “gestalt language processor”.

This is a designation for people who primarily develop language in a gestalt style, a.k.a. gestalt language development.

They tend to acquire whole phrases of language that they hear in their surroundings and then over time can come to recombine or remix the words in those phrases to make new phrases.

In the autism world, this language is also called delayed echolalia.

When my son, N, was a toddler he amassed a library of single words which he never put together into simple novel sentences.

Instead he skipped right to saying full phrases from books, songs, and things he heard others say exactly as he heard them.

Over time his speech development significantly regressed.

He spoke less often and his speech intelligibility decreased.

This regression was certainly biological because of the neurological impact of autism but it was further compounded by his experiences with communication and language interventions that did not account for nor accommodate his gestalt language development.

After many years of flatlining development and further regression of communication skills, I began using the Natural Language Acquisition (NLA) protocol to support his gestalt language development when my son was 9 years old.

NLA is currently the only approach that not only explicitly acknowledges delayed echolalia but it lays out how to support its growth by modeling more holistic, consistent, individualized phrases and then closely following behind the development of the person to support segmenting, remixing, or recombining those full phrases to expand language use and communication.

When beginning NLA, I had baseline data and have monitored his language growth over the last 5 years.

N’s frequency of spoken language increased.

His delayed echolalia evolved from using whole phrases to segmenting and recombining them to make new, different phrases.

Even though his spoken language increased from baseline it is still far, far below what would be expected for a now teenager.

The highest frequency of him using speech has been 10 times in a day, but there is no consistent use of speech.

He does not even have consistent speech to verbally indicate yes or no.

What little speech he does express from time to time is also not consistently intelligible to others.

As his body and brain are going through adolescent development, his spontaneous spoken speech has declined dramatically to now just a few spoken words or phrases in a month.

And that is why I have unexpectedly become a staunch supporter of phonics instruction for the reason that it is a potential avenue to learn to write to communicate.

Using spoken speech to make his thoughts, needs, and wants known is simply not an option for him.

Phonics is not just some institutional hoop to jump through, it has potential to become one of the multiple lifelines to communication for my son.

A Hyperlexic, Letter Loving Baby

Now backing up again to the earliest years.

N was fascinated by text, letters and numbers, very early in his life.

He loved staring at the wooden letters of his name on his bedroom wall.

His alphabet board books were a beloved treasure and he looked at them for hours everyday.

He loved letters so much that I scoured for and got him anything with the alphabet that was not a choking hazard for a baby or toddler.

The baby picture posted above shows him sitting up so beautifully for his portrait to commemorate his very 1st birthday.

During the portrait session the photographer laid down large wooden letters on the floor spelling out the word, ONE.

Upon seeing the jumbo letters laid down in front of him, N squealed with delight and grabbed up the letter N.

He was so proud to hold the first letter of his name.

A knowledge already possessed at the tender age of 1 year old.

It was so cute that I told the photographer to just capture the picture as it was.

Let’s just say he started out his literacy journey with a huge bang.

In spite of having a huge head start with loving text and being able to read, N never could arrange letters into words.

He could read whole words by sight alone.

But he could not write.

This had to be addressed.

Simply memorizing words by sight or shape was not going to cut it since he did that already with his natural hyperlexic abilities.

In order to spell and write, N needed to be supported to learn how to identify individual letter sounds and letter sound combinations within whole words.

This is where phonics comes in.

The Crosshairs of the Phonics Wars

Literacy is a bunch of interrelated moving parts.

Current best practices point to 5 main “keys” to becoming literate: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

This blog is focusing on just one key: Phonics.

Phonics is teaching the use of letter sound relationships in words (sound to print).

Phonics is controversial and there has been fighting about how to teach it for decades and decades.

There are proponents of teaching phonics more sporadically, which carries the risk of not teaching all the sounds or not giving enough exposure to students who need it.

There are proponents of teaching synthetic phonics, which is sequentially and explicitly teaching all letter and letter combination sounds in very concentrated ways, which can carry the risk of making literacy aversive.

Many students will learn to read and write no matter the approach used, but there is a significant group of students who will not.

Additionally if a student is autistic they may also have co-occurring dyslexia, specific learning disabilities, and/or intellectual disabilities.

Research leans toward synthetic phonics as being a little more advantageous particularly for students who do not learn to read and/or spell easily because it gives more concentrated exposure and practice.

Some have interpreted synthetic phonics to mean inflexibly adhering to a scripted curriculum and/or doing dry out of context phonics drills with excessive testing.

This does not have to be.

Professionals can and should individualize to each student’s needs, *especially* if they are disabled students.

It is not the phonics itself that is the problem, it is the manner of how it is approached and taught.

We can be creative in finding ways to provide exposure to synthetic phonics that meets the individual needs of students without withholding, restricting, or resorting to practices, such as explicitly teaching memorizing whole words, which may give appearance of short term results but can cause long term harm.

Emergent Literacy: A Stepping Stone to Phonics

Emergent literacy is a set of literacy practices typically geared towards the early childhood years, but some people with developmental and intellectual disabilities may benefit from emergent literacy practices for longer.

A great resource that explains emergent literacy in depth that is good for younger, older, or disabled students is Comprehensive Literacy For All (CFLA) framework which has a book of the same name.

For the sake of this blog I am going to highlight only one part of emergent literacy that is a key player in merging to synthetic phonics later on.

This part is alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness.

Alphabet knowledge is getting opportunities to learn about letter names, shapes, and sounds for A-Z, 26 letters in all.

Phonological awareness is noticing sounds in language such as noticing the number of words in a sentence, syllables, rhyming words, and exploring words with the same beginning sounds A-Z.

With emergent literacy both phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge are typically done in playful, hands-on ways by singing songs, reading books, and playing with toys, games, and apps.

For phonological awareness we can turn to activities like reading Dr. Suess books, nursery rhymes, and noticing rhymes in popular songs.

“This little light of mine, I’m going to let it ______ (can you fill in the rhyming word?)

We can play with funny sayings that have the same beginning sound in all the words.

“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”

“Bibbity bobbity boo!”

We can choose a letter of the alphabet and find favorite words with that beginning letter.

B is for ball, blanket, bus, bug, blue, bounce, beautiful.

Last, alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness can be embedded incidentally throughout the day or be covered for short periods in structured ways, this can be determined by the age and needs of students.

N and His Alphabet Gestalts

One interesting thing about N’s journey in relation to his gestalt language development is that he could not accurately identify, find, or sort words by their initial sounds up until 12 years old.

He happily played with many tablet apps that covered the concept of beginning sounds in words but often got the activities wrong, even though he could read the words.

While he did not achieve proficiency during this time he did however, on some level, build up background knowledge about phonics in words.

It did not hurt him to have that exposure especially because it was through exploration and fun, not drills or testing.

He ended up coming to that knowledge through what I call: “alphabet gestalts”.

For years he had an alphabet sound puzzle that when you placed the letters in it would exclaim in a computerized voice, “B is for ball”, “R is for rose”, “S is for star”.

He would silently put in a letter puzzle piece, listen to the language chunk, put it back in, listen, take it out, and out it in again.

It wasn’t until we began supporting his gestalt language with NLA that he began to repeat some, but not all, of those alphabet puzzle piece language chunks with speech.

His ultimate favorite one to repeat with speech, when he could, was “B is for ball”.

I hand wrote out “B is for ball” for him so he could also visually process the word boundaries of that language chunk (which helped with seeing the number of words in a sentence).

After some time, I modeled remixing “B is for ball” with other favorite words beginning with letter B.

In the NLA community this is also termed as mitigation, taking a language chunk or gestalt phrase to expand language use by changing it a little bit in consistent, patterned ways.

“B is for blanket”

”B is for baseball”

”B is for black”

“B is for blender”

”B is for bubbles”

Eventually on his own N segmented the word “blanket” from the alphabet gestalt as a standalone single word and a handful of times combined it with other favorite single words to make short phrases like “blanket warm”.

With single words, we created visual representations of exploring segmenting and remixing beginning letters of words and the remaining chunks of words.

This was simply an extension of NLA’s description of mitigation except with single words instead of gestalt phrases.

B-lanket

B-aseball

B-lack

B-lender

B-ubbles

One of those letter B words, blanket, continued to hold significance as we layered in synthetic phonics onto alphabet awareness and phonological awareness.

Merging Alphabet Knowledge With Synthetic Phonics

Developmental science has found that children ages 6 years and younger have better long term outcomes from engaging with child led emergent literacy practices to get a solid foundation for adult led synthetic phonics later.

I like to keep in mind that participants in research with adult led synthetic phonics were 6 years and older in age.

There are many commercial synthetic phonics curriculums and resources available (e.g. UFLI, All About Spelling, Logic of English, Explode the Code and more).

When N was 6-7 years old, I tried an adult led synthetic phonics curriculum with minimal success.

It became necessary to delay the adult led synthetic phonics and shift to more of a facilitator role to support N’s strengths for self directed learning (a.k.a “unschooling).

I carefully nurtured his self exploration, provided digital and screen free media, and modeled phonics activities while simultaneously monitoring which sounds he had explored.

Viewing Phonics Skills Progress as a Spiral, Not a Staircase

Synthetic phonics does not have to be a step by step hierarchy nor have a set of criteria of mastery to continue accessing it.

For us, the goal is purely to access meaningful synthetic phonics.

Through his many years of self directed learning N engaged with many rounds of synthetic phonics on his own with me at his side offering encouragement, suggestions, and modeling.

Around age 12 years old, his growing maturity and gestalt language development gradually bloomed into him being more successful with adult directed synthetic phonics.

He began to happily oblige with my proposals of what sounds to work on while still being supported to choose how to engage (e.g. choices of activities).

We continued to work on letters A-Z, doing many more rounds of studying those sounds but in more of a sequential adult led style.

He gradually gained skills in a spiral manner, with each round of broader exposure to phonics he scooped up new knowledge each time.

We kept increasing the complexity of vocabulary even more by searching for “fancy words” in alphabet books, word lists online, and utilizing a thesaurus.

N mostly silently participated in these studies.

There were rare but very revealing occasions when he spoke.

We were looking for higher tier vocabulary words for the letter V on the internet.

I found the word vast, I asked if he liked that word.

He excitedly shook the fidget in his hand, which meant yes.

I scribed the word v-a-s-t while modeling each letter sound as I wrote, and then N spoke the word, “fast” (a highly favorite word).

Later after finding the word whimsical for the letter W he spoke a gestalt, “what’s that?.

I proudly wrote that down and also modeled how to pull the contraction apart to “what is that?”

A few minutes later he spoke, “where is that?”

I just about fell out of my chair in shock.

Even though these spontaneous spoken expressions of knowledge happened so infrequently, it spurred us both on to keep going.

We added in studying letters that have more than one sound such as vowels, C, G, and S.

Then came many rounds of working with short consonant vowel consonant (CVC) words (e.g. cat, dog, bug).

We started by working with whole CVC words and learned how to “fill-in” just one letter so finding the letter B to put in front of the letters -UG to make the word BUG.

One day when he was 13, while listening to a Sesame Street Song called, “Elmo’s Song” I wrote the initial letter of some of the words with a dry erase marker on a whiteboard as the words were sung.

E for Elmo

S for Snuffy

S for Song

B for Big Bird

N who struggles tremendously with drawing and writing slowly wrote EB and then made more marks over it.

I questioned, “Elmo, Big Bird?”

He quietly said “Blanket”

We kept marching on to cover the L, R, and S blends.

One day I could hear him loudly scripting to himself across the room and made out that he was segmenting the words black, block, and blech.

BLL-ACK!!

BLL-OCK!!!

BLL-ECH!!! (our family saying for, yuck!)

I noted that he was demonstrating knowledge of L-blends and of vowel sounds.

Interestingly, he did not use the other other vowels (i, u) which would have made useless nonsense words (bl-ick, bl-uck)

When we watched some music videos of R-blends he pulled up home video clips that are embedded in his high tech AAC device of GR-ANDPA mowing the GR-ASS and using a weed TR-IMMER, as well as a video of a toy DR-ILL.

Quite a nice expression of his knowledge of R-blends!

One night we were playing with sensory dough set that had an alphabet mold.

N pointed the letter B then to W and said, “blanket warm”

Another time I was modeling writing on a white board.

He took the dry erase marker and made the letters “WM” and spoke the word warm.

Then we chugged along to the consonant digraphs: ch, sh, ph, wh, th.

One night after choosing to work on typing the phrase “Go Phillies!”, he typed the letters PHR.

I did not realize until days later that he was making a connection to an interaction from months before when we studied PH-words that I had told him that an example of a “phrase” could be, “Go Phillies!”.

Then we moved on to:

-Long vowel teams for all vowels (ay, ai, ee, ea etc.)

-Bossy R Vowels (ar, er, ir, or, ur)

-Dipthongs (oo/oo, oi/oy, ow/ow, aw/au)

During a writing activity about a popcorn popper he pre-chose to work on typing the sentence “I hear popcorn” but added his own phonetic embellishments that incorporated his knowledge of vowel teams to express, “I heer poopcoorn”.

During a word ladder activity for the dipthongs oy/oi he typed “goy” instead of the word “joy” showing his creative prowess by combining a soft g, which sounds and looks like the letter j, with the dipthong -oy.

One recent night at nearly 15 years old, N was vocally scripting in front of the mirror and I figured out that he was verbally segmenting the word “mouth” with its beginning, middle, and end sounds. It was also evidence that he understood a dipthong (ou) and a digraph (th).

And we are still going strong. Phonics strong!

Synthetic Phonics Instruction: Our Personal Adaptations

I write the following as a parent who homeschools my child. I do not take lightly my privilege to do that.

Many public school professionals do work tirelessly in the cracks of a flawed system. I have nothing but gratitude for those who do their best to individualize robust synthetic phonics instruction within the constraints they have.

These adaptations that we have done with synthetic phonics were made to meet the specific needs of one person, they may not work for another person.

The adaptations we use are not rules or a strict template for others to follow but rather just ideas of how it is possible to flex synthetic phonics curricula to a person’s needs as well as supporting a person who has a gestalt style of cognition and language.

I do not interpret having high expectations for phonics instruction as having no regard for adjusting to specific needs, interests, and language development.

The only high expectations I have are that N has the right to access to meaningful phonics instruction and he can progress at his own pace.

We do not only work on synthetic phonics incidentally or randomly.

Even though it was initially mostly self directed by N, we do phonics work daily for around 10 minutes total in a day for 4-5 days.

I do not do any out of context, rote and remote drills with single letters/letter combinations.

I adapt phonics instruction to accommodate N’s gestalt language development and natural tendencies towards pattern finding.

We do not currently do the practice of taking random single letters and then blending them together to make words from scratch. For example taking the letters a, b, m, t and working to construct them to make random words such as an, at, bat, mat, man, ban, tan.

Instead, we work to cover the phonics sounds within the context of whole words and examine all the letter sounds/combinations in the whole words.

It looks more like a process of dissecting groups of words with similar sound patterns and then putting them together and/or remixing them to make new words.

For example we might look at a group of -igh words such as light, right, tight, night, sight on strips of paper, cut them into their smallest parts l-igh-t, r-igh-t, t-igh-t, n-igh-t, s-igh-t, and then put them back together again with glue or tape.

I do not force compliance with phonics lessons, there is no first/ then strategies, bribery, or withholding favorite things.

I work instead on individualizing, adapting, and supplementing lessons to incorporate favorite gestalts, words, topics, and activities.

I do not insist on sitting still at a table doing “book” work.

We have done phonics work while walking around, out in the backyard, while dancing, while doing OT exercises, and in the sensory swing.

We have used digital media, as well as screen free media such as letter stamps, letter stickers, letter labelers, letter tiles, wooden craft letters, lacing letter beads, letter puzzles, letter lace ups, letter toys and much more.

We do not attempt to read or spell “nonsense words” (bod, lin, rog).

We work on reading and spelling authentic whole words.

We do not read commercial decodable books such as the commercial “BOB Books”.

After loving books for the first 4 years of life, N became intolerant of books and read alouds for many years.

Knowing N so deeply, I knew decodable books would have exacerbated his intolerance of interacting with books even more.

We read real literature for real reasons. No matter how small.

Sometimes that meant reading recipes to make a meal or snack, step by step instructions for a science experiment, or even just one page from a book.

I did not follow the typical sequence of introducing phonic sounds with complete exactness.

I focused on beginning sounds in words for longer and merely delayed vowel teams (ai, ay, ea, ee etc) as well as dipthongs (oi/oy, au/aw etc.).

My reasoning for this was twofold.

One, N has general challenges with any kind of sequencing, so getting that first letter or letter combination sound down was critical.

Two, if he could type the first letter, or two, into a keyboard it opens the door to accessing lists of predicted words that are built into softwares.

So typing BL could bring up the predicted words like blanket, blue black blow or other BL words he would want to most commonly use.

The plan remains to cover ALL the scope of phonics content, not to skip it or substitute it with non-synthetic phonics strategies.

I do not focus excessively on phonics rules.

We simply engage with and explore groups of words that follow a particular rule.

For example the soft C rule is: if C is followed by e, i, or y it makes a sound like /s/.

We just wrote out a list of ce-, ci-, and cy- words to see and get a feel for what those pattern look like in a holistic way.

celery, cement, cereal, ceiling

city, cinnamon

cyborg, recycle

We did ‘not’ solely stick with emergent alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness supports even though N did not meet CFLA’s criteria for moving to conventional word study (phonics).

N was and is missing two of four CFLA criteria to move on from emergent literacy to conventional literacy.

He does not engage strongly with shared reading nor use words within a communication system to interact.

Given his strengths and desire to write it felt wrong to hold him back.

We moved on and he has greatly benefitted from the exposure to more complex phonics.

Interestingly synthetic phonics instruction has pulled him into being interested in reading books cover to cover again.

It has been amazing. No regrets at all.

I do not test or expect mastery of phonics skills at high percentages.

Again the goal is for him to learn and get exposure, not to be a performing parrot for the benefit of an adult or curriculum.

If he was in public school, I would advocate that he be opted out of excessive testing and assessments.

While I have used several phonics resources and curricula, I do not use them to scrupulous fidelity.

I do adapt and individualize phonics tasks or activities to meet N’s specific needs while ensuring that all phonics skills are covered.

I have supplemented curriculums with carefully selected music, apps, videos, and hands-on activities.

I do not expect repeated demonstration or performance of skills.

There is no expectation that he must demonstrate mastery of skills a certain number of times.

I observe and note his spontaneous demonstrations of knowledge, even if it is just one single time.

I take it as he understands and continue to support his ongoing learning.

In all transparency there are many times of N appearing distracted, not listening, or not getting “correct” answers on his own.

We do a lot of work collaboratively and take turns doing activities so he does not feel chronically put on the spot.

We take lots of breaks from synthetic phonics to let things marinate, sometimes even for months.

And yet he has indeed learned phonics and it may be a future tool to communicate.

No student is too anything…..

In the world of literacy and disability studies there is an oft repeated quote that “no student is too anything to learn to read and write.” (attributed to David Yoder).

I would like to extend that line of thinking to phonics instruction.

No student is too anything to have meaningful access to phonics instruction.

Even if that means making it loads of fun.

I would just ensure all sounds and letter patterns in words are studied thoroughly and for as long (or short) as a student needs.

No student is too anything to have meaningful access to phonics instruction.

They are not “too GLP, too autistic, too hyperlexic, too dyspraxic, too ADHD, too little joint attention, too old, too cognitively disabled, too language delayed, or too smart”.

If we begin to recommend restricting a part of high quality comprehensive literacy instruction or recommending substituting it with something else we are literally throwing away one of the keys to unlocking reading and writing for entire groups of people, some of whom are of very vulnerable populations.

I encourage everyone to cast a wide net and gather a wide range of perspectives on literacy development from research, from professional practice, and lived experiences.

I can listen carefully and respectfully to the lived experience of a single person or even from a group using a particular teaching methodology.

However, I also know I must contrast that single perspective against a range of many lived experiences, along with current multidisciplinary research, and current best literacy practices while simultaneously keeping the person I am supporting in front and center.

It is not easy to seek out and juggle so much information, but it is necessary to make sure every person gets what they need based on their own needs and not someone else’s needs.

I share our personal story here, our own lived experience, to show that it ‘IS’ possible to implement meaningful synthetic phonics even for a nonspeaking, hyperlexic, dyspraxic, autistic person with co-occurring ADHD, cognitive disabilities, and learning disabilities.

There are amazing professionals who are also successfully teaching synthetic phonics to students with very complex needs such as Kate Ahern of AAC Voices.

There is a range of lived experiences who share that accessing phonics fully unlocked literacy for them such as autistic professor Dr. Jason Arday who became fully literate at age 18 years old.

Or they are learning to read and spell later in life after being denied literacy instruction and are now working on becoming literate alongside their own young children such as adult AAC user Jamie Preece.

We must all work collectively together to promote accessing literacy in ways that have long term benefits, not just a short term appearance of proficiency (e.g. directly teaching memorizing whole words).

We must work together to individualize all literacy instruction to the specific needs of every student.

No one is too anything to access meaningful phonics.

Admittedly and unfortunately institutional settings can zap the joy out of any subject area especially in an era of hyper standardized testing.

The academic subject of history can also be made into drudgery and math can be implemented to be anxiety provoking.

Just because that can and does happen doesn’t mean we should cast off those academic subjects.

It is the same with phonics.

We have so many available phonics curricula and resources that when paired with practices such as universal design for learning (UDL), differentiated instruction, and academic modifications, we really can meet the specific needs of students.

No one is too anything to access meaningful phonics instruction.

Every person deserves a solid chance to experience the liberation of literacy.

N’s language development was unconventional from the very beginning.

He did not follow the same language trajectory that is commonly shown in the developmental screenings in pediatrician's offices.

As a toddler, he developed many single words, and then made this huge leap into saying full phrases from what he heard in conversations, from books, and songs.

He was precocious, and incredibly adorable.

However, professional assessments said there was something wrong with his language and we fell into the therapy world to address it.

After many years of trying to help N’s language to develop into spontaneous, novel, utterance, generation (SNUG) through a variety of conventional therapy approaches, his language development had worsened instead of improving.

He had gone almost silent.

I stumbled upon Marge Blanc’s articles about her clinical work supporting autistic youth’s delayed echolalia and the resulting protocol Natural Language Acquisition (NLA).

The delayed echolalia that brought him so much joy as a toddler had gradually disappeared.

He was on the brink of AAC abandonment.

We had exhausted all the options available to us at the time.

So we gave NLA a try.

I stopped using simplified language and began shifting my own language to using whole consistently patterned melodic sounding sentences that his brain might latch onto.

There was an immediate difference in N’s affect towards me.

Instead of running away from me, he ran towards me.

Several months later he began to speak some of the phrases.

Under the guidance of the NLA protocol, I not only repeated back to him what he said, no matter how unusual it was, I also incrementally introduced how those gestalt phrases could be segmented and recombined.

Over days, weeks, months, then years I have documented his spoken language.

It not only increased in frequency from baseline.

His language evolved, it developed.

He acquired many more spoken gestalt phrases.

He began to spontaneously segment his gestalt phrases by swapping out words and slotting in new words, thus modifying his own language.

Then he began to occasionally segment a single word from a gestalt phrase and put it together with another single word.

NLA has not been any kind of “cure”, or made him a fluent speaker.

But today he is a confident nonspeaker who sees ALL of his own ways of communication being authentically respected and valued.

Before using NLA, language had become incredibly unpredictable and chaotic to him.

His apraxia of speech, dyspraxia, and global learning disabilities made it difficult for him to efficiently organize and say random streams of words by mouth as well as stringing together icons or words on an AAC device.

NLA’s approach to supporting delayed echolalia helped N to see language as predictable, patterned, and with the formulaic “remixable” gestalt phrases the beginnings of the phrases often stayed the same making it easier for him to speak them aloud.

For example I took a favorite gestalt phrase of his, “Look up high!”, and modeled remixing it while keeping it predictable.

”Look up high!”

”Look up there!”

”Look at that!

”Look at me!”

All of those are easy to remember, easy to say, and highly salient across many, many experiences which provide tons of practice in hearing and speaking language.

Even though he still cannot use speech as a primary form of communication, these consistent gestalt phrases have also improved N’s speech intelligibility due to their predictable sound streams so when he does speak we can understand him at least some of the time.

There are professionals who might argue that gestalt phrases are limiting, and that N should be able to say what he wants using any kind of mixture of words (aka SNUG) 100% of the time.

However given N’s circumstances as a nonspeaker with multiple disabilities, consistent, highly generalizable gestalt phrases are absolutely liberating for him especially when after years of trying commonly accepted peer reviewed evidence based interventions he was using no language to express himself.

None.

Zero language.

As a nonspeaker, he needs every communication option he can access on the table.

It is his human right to use delayed echolalia to communicate and to have his gestalt language development to be amply supported by his family and disability service providers.

While NLA may not be the right approach for everyone, it was completely right for him.

The linked video in this post is an unexpected sequel to one of the most viewed videos from the past about one of his favorite, albeit unusual, gestalt phrases.

The newest video shows how all the exposure that N has had with segmenting and remixing gestalt language phrases boosted his ability to segment language all the way down to individual sounds in words.

This most recent language development has opened the door wider for him to use speech if able and to be able to write out words letter sounds by letter sounds as yet another option to communicate.

2021 Video New Gestalt Language Emergence

2025 Video Gestalt Language Segmentation

So this is going to be a Throwback Thursday kind of blog/vlog.

Before becoming a full time caregiver and homeschooling teacher, I put in nearly two decades of a career into teaching in public schools.

I feel so honored and truly fortunate to come to know hundreds of autistic students.

Many were fluent speakers, and some were nonspeakers, and some were in between.

Some autistic students found acquiring full literacy easy.

Some of my littlest autistic students, at just 3 or 4 years old, could take letter magnets and deftly make words like Disney and Netflix.

Some of my elementary autistic students, who were mainstreamed full time, needed more support and we plugged them into special education resource room services to address any literacy gaps they had.

As many of you may already know, N could always read because of hyperlexia, but never could spell.

Nevertheless, for many years he loved his letters and loved reading text.

I tried teaching him sequential synthetic phonics, adapted for nonspeakers, when he was around 6 years old, and he was not successful with it.

I tentatively tried it again at ages 7, 8, 9, 10….

I could have pushed him through it, but it would have caused him stress and frustration.

However, I knew he was such a letter lover and a bonafide, amazing self directed learner.

So I got him any and every toy and ipad app with literacy or letters that I could find.

Since he loved music, I showed him Youtube music videos about the alphabet and phonics.

Then I let him loose.

He was wild and free to feast on literacy and phonics on his own, in ways that made sense to him while I remained nearby providing support and encouragement.

He delighted in many of the resources I found.

And absolutely hated some of them.

Now looking back I can see that the literacy media that he loved the most during those very self directed years were very gestalt-y with stronger aspects of “wholeness”.

He loved the media that showed either the whole entire alphabet, or just single letters alone, and/or showed whole words and phrases.

The Starfall app was a favorite app of his for several years.

It showed the uppercase and lowercase letters, and then showed pictures with whole words while highlighting the first letter.

(STARFALL PHOTOS: letter Vv with picture of two vacuum cleaners and a groovy coloful van with the word “van” on the side)

This Starfall app also had a “sound machine” game where you could see words, it highlighted each sound in the words, and with a push of a button or lever it switched out a letter to make a whole new word (jet turned into wet, pet etc.)

(SOUND MACHINE GAME PHOTO: A tween boy is kneeling at a couch watching an ipad with an animation of a yellow sound machine depicting the word jet)

He loved these Starfall app activities so much.

However, there were some phonics media that I offered him and he would literally run out of the room.

One of the literacy media that he could not tolerate was the Youtube phonics songs from the “Rock N Learn” channel.

I thought maybe the music was bothersome, and just shelved it.

When N began to spontaneously segment words off his gestalt phrases (aka delayed echolalia) at close to age 12, I again tried dipping back into offering him adult led synthetic phonics.

He began to be more successful with it.

We did several rounds of learning to segment initial sounds in words with all the letters of the alphabet A-Z. (e.g. words with A-apple, astronaut, alligator etc.)

Then we got to consonant blends, specifically L-blends and R-blends (e.g. BLanket, BLue, GRandma, GRass).

At this point in time, I tried re-offering the “Rock N Learn” song series.

Surprisingly, N loved the songs and watched them happily.

Not only did he love it, he communicated to me that he understood by cleverly pulling up a few home video clips that are embedded in his AAC device.

At the time, I did not fully understand why the change of mind?

Why were the “Rock N Learn” songs so bothersome to him prior to his gestalt language development maturing?

Now that he is almost 15 years old, I have seen even more of his development.

I can see the longer term emerging patterns within his own unique language and literacy development.

When N was primarily in stages 1-2 of gestalt language development, he was not, yet, fully seeing and hearing the individual words in those gestalt phrases.

He was getting the gist of the meaning of some of the gestalt language as a whole and they often made some sense when they unexpectedly and intelligibly ‘popped out’ of his mouth, such as saying “let’s go back to bed” when walking out of a hardware store back to our vehicle in the parking lot.

He knew “let’s go back to bed” meant going back to a place where we started, but was not yet seeing how the word “bed” could be segmented off and the words “the truck” could be ‘slotted in’.

(sidenote: having access to each of his full gestalt phrases programmed on their own single buttons on his AAC app within multiple photographic visual scenes of his personal daily life was the catalyst to him better seeing and hearing those individual words-“let’s go to bed”, “let’s go outside”, “let’s go get a shower” etc.)

At that time, he also saw each letter of the alphabet as its own “whole” picture, a whole symbol, a whole gestalt.

Aa, was a gestalt, Bb was a gestalt, Cc was a gestalt. Each letter stood alone, a complete whole, a totality, in and of itself.

The whole alphabet, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, was also a whole gestalt.

I have heard stories of other children who primarily use gestalt language, and are alphabet lovers, becoming dysregulated if a letter was missing from the alphabet.

That was not the case with N, you could hand him just one letter and he was happy as a clam because the single letter was, to him, its own whole gestalt.

In fact, when he was little he would often pick a letter from a letter toy set and carry it around all day like a near and dear friend.

So he did not mind seeing the entire alphabet at once, or letters individually, or seeing whole words starting with those sounds like in the Starfall app, or other ipad apps like Metamorphabet, or the Leapfrog Letter phonics magnet toy.

However, in the “Rock N Learn” music videos it flashes a large segmented part of the word, so for the word drone, it flashes and sings the sound “DR-DR-DR” along with the word and picture of a drone.

(Rock N Learn DRONE PHOTO: a screenshot of the Rock N Learn Consonant Blend songs, the letters “dr” are on the left and the word “drone” is on the top right and a picture of a drone is below the word drone)

I speculate, this is just pure hypothesis, that perhaps, initially seeing and hearing these particular videos might have been similar to being presented with a chair with one leg chopped off and the leg set on the floor next to the chair.

Then being asked to participate in sitting in that very chair with that one leg segmented off.

I would certainly decline that opportunity myself, and perhaps I might have run out of the room too.

Once we began supporting N’s gestalt language with the Natural Language Acquisition protocol, his gestalt language development matured, then he began to more clearly see and hear the individual words in his gestalt phrases.

After the emergence of his deepening understanding of the single words within his gestalts, we successfully began our work with adult led intensive synthetic phonics.

From there he began to see, hear, and deepen in understanding that individual words have individual sounds too.

(The whole word CAT has 3 individual sounds within it, C-A-T, in that specific order or sequence, not mashed together like TCA or TAC)

At this conjecture in his gestalt language development when he saw the DR-DR-DR drone song, he did not run out of the room.

He now understood that DR was a partitioned segment from the whole word DRONE.

And not only that, he responded by going into his high tech AAC device and pulled up a short home video clip of himself playing with a, DRILL.

There you go, his very own example of segmentation, DR-ill!

(PHOTO: a screen shot of an ipad AAC device depicting a toy drill drilling a bolt into a picture with pre-cut holes )

Now how about that creative communication to knock your socks off?!

Some might think that it was a coincidence, or that he was just “stimming”.

Yet, after the GR-blend song he pulled up another home video clip, this time it was of his GRandfather mowing the GRass.

(PHOTO: a screenshot of an ipad AAC device with a grandfather mowing a grassy lawn and the grandson is walking nearby)

Coincidence? Not so.

Furthermore, after the TR-blend song, he pulled up a home video clip of his GRandpa using a weed TRimmer.

The thing is, he is a gardener at heart and has many home video clips in his AAC device of different people doing yard and gardening work.

These creative communications, using video clips, to share his knowledge were fully intentional and quite revealing of how much he has been taking everything in, even when under a neuronormative lens it often did not look like he was listening at all.

Now to get more serious.

There are conversations going on about whether or not autistic nonspeakers need intensive literacy instruction to include phonics instruction to read and write.

I can’t answer that for other people, but I can answer that for N.

Yes, N can read, but he struggles immensely with spelling and writing.

N’s spelling and writing difficulties are not solely caused by his motor planning disability, dyspraxia.

Dyspraxia is only one part of this multi-layered issue.

There is a family history of both dyspraxia and dyslexia.

He has a very smart close relative that is dyslexic and did not learn to read until age 11, after years of special education support.

Today, this relative is a support to us in supporting N’s literacy journey.

They share with us that reading and writing is still hard and laborious, but today they love devouring 2-inch thick novels.

There is even another compounding layer to N’s obstacles to attaining full literacy, because he also has apraxia of speech.

People with apraxia of speech may also have co-occurring difficulties with reading and writing, especially if the speech disability persists after the age of 5 years old.

There is a current body of research, often termed “science of reading”, in which a statistic is reported that 60-70% of students acquire literacy easily and quickly.

I personally was in this 60-70% of student group. I picked up literacy so lightning fast without intensive instruction around the age of 4 years old.

Reading and writing to me was like breathing, and as a deaf/hard of hearing person it gave me a visual input to language that I needed since I was not allowed to use a signed language.

However, the other part of that statistic is that 30-40% of students do need intensive explicit instruction to acquire full literacy.

Additionally, the educational recommendations for those who struggle with reading or writing, such as those with dyslexia, is none other than explicit intensive literacy instruction.

In spite of being hyperlexic, N completely falls into that 30-40% of individuals who reap tremendous benefit from explicit intensive literacy instruction.

No one should be ashamed of accessing explicit intensive literacy instruction, no matter their disabilities, their age, or in spite of the many strengths or talents that they may have.

One person that I learned that from is an autistic professor at University of Cambridge, UK, Jason Arday, who has shared his own language and literacy development.

Jason Arday did not develop spoken speech until age 9 years old.

After acquiring spoken speech, he still struggled for many years to acquire full literacy.

He tells stories of his teachers who never gave up on him, and worked with him on phonics for years, all the way until he was 18 years old before it finally clicked for him.

And now he is changing the world, as a professor, at a prestigious university.

Intensive explicit literacy instruction can be life changing for the people who need it.

I know it certainly has been life changing for my nonspeaking autistic son.

The work N has done (with calibrated supports) in figuring out how to segment words from gestalt phrases, then to segmenting sounds within those words, is actually boosting his ability to motor plan spelling and writing with alternative pencils such as a keyboard.

He can better see and hear each sound in each word, which is gradually empowering him to begin to reach his hand out to an alternative pencil and select the first sound, then the next, and then the next.

Until maybe someday, like Professor Jason Arday, it will all completely come together for him and he will have yet another modality in his communication toolbox to communicate his knowledge, thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

And if not, that is okay too, because as a multimodal, highly creative communicator he will continue to let himself be known in whatever way works best for him.

(see below for a link to the much shortened video version of this story as well as ‘layman’ references to topics I covered in this blog)

References and Resources:

Video: Youtube link to N of 1 Creative Communication About Phonics Knowledge in 2023

Article: 30-40% of students need intensive explicit literacy instruction

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/why-more-u-s-schools-are-embracing-a-new-science-of-reading

Website: Dyslexia Support Recommendations

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dyslexia/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20353557

Video: Professor Jason Arday’s language and literacy journey

The Cambridge Professor Who Learned To Read At 18

Article: Apraxia and Reading, Writing Difficulties

https://www.apraxia-kids.org/apraxia_kids_library/children-with-apraxia-and-reading-writing-and-spelling-difficulties/

The year that N was born and barely home from the hospital they won the world series.

I like to tell him that when he came into this world he brought the team so much luck which is why they succeeded in winning the world series, and then went on to win two more world series after that!

Years later, he participated in an amazing program in our city where he got to play on an inclusive t-ball team, the Phillies.

The coach was so amazing at building the comradeship in that little Phillies t-ball team that N deviated from family tradition and became a diehard Phillies baseball fan.

He loves watching the games every season so we can cheer the Phillies on.

During baseball games his dad’s phone usually lights up with texts with family member’s game updates and baseball chats.

Since N had been practicing typing sentences, one night after a game I offered an opportunity to type out a cheer with the idea that someday he could be in those family text threads.

I wrote a couple slips of paper with cheers on them and offered them.

He pointed to “Go Phillies!”.

I quickly retrieved the letter labeler and video camera to record him learning to type to document progress and ways I could improve my teaching.

I modeled typing the word GO on the letter labeler and held it out for him to see.

After I set it back down on the table, he pecked out the letters GO, then suddenly picked up the letter labeler to study the screen in quiet amazement.

I exclaimed…”you wrote the word GO!”, then I showed him the space bar to press next.

He found the P on his own, and pressed the button hard which made a long string of text, PPPPPPPPPP.

I reminded him that the word Phillies only has one letter P, and helped him backspace to make a single letter P.

I pointed to the slip of paper and showed that after P was H to make the PH, or the /f/ sound, for Phillies.

He pushed the letter H, making the writing, “GO PH”.

He studied this writing for a good long while.

I suspected he might be getting tired since it was later at night, so I went to grab an index card to cover part of the keyboard to reduce the visual and cognitive load.

He selected R.

Thus making the sequence of letters “GO PHR.”

In some of our past typing activities N has creatively showcased his growing phonics knowledge by slotting sounds into words that made some fun sense in the moment, such as swapping in a soft ‘g’ to turn the word ‘joy’ into ‘goy’ and swapping in a different vowel team ‘ee’ to change the word ‘hear’ to ‘heer’.

Again, it was later in the night, and I figured he might be fatigued and made a mistake.

Before beginning this impromptu typing practice, he had chosen and pre-planned to type out “Go Phillies!”.

So I told him that he got the “R”, but needed the letter “I” to make the word PHILLIES.

I helped him backspace and we ended up working together to write out “Go Phillies!” by me typing a letter and then he typed a letter until it was accomplished.

He was pretty thrilled at the end result of writing a favorite saying of his, evidenced by him looking at the finished label and smiling.

By then we really were all tired and went to bed shortly thereafter.

Later on, I was part of an interesting online discussion that made me think that I should go back and review the video footage of that night.

I watched it and in hindsight I thought maybe I should have been more curious about his selection of the letters PHR, especially since those letters in sequence could plausibly be a word.

I had a nagging feeling and questioned, “Was his selection of the letter R truly an error?”

A few months prior during our phonics work we had studied the digraph, PH. I often take photos to document his studies.

I looked back in my phone’s photo reel from that time to see if I had documented anything.

Sure enough I found a photo of one of the activities that we did.

I zoomed in on the photo and when I saw it my heart soared and sank all at once.

In the photo, I was reminded that I had given N a bunch of small word cards that contained the digraph PH in them.

Throughout our homeschooling journey we have focused a lot of our energy on engaging with real reasons for writing rather than performative writing.

We very often apply writing skills to find information on the internet, to search for videos in Youtube, and to get songs off Spotify to listen to.

By participating in these self directed pursuits, N is becoming a lifelong learner who is learning how to seek and find knowledge for himself.

I had asked him to choose five PH words from those cards so that he could practice typing on the letter labeler.

One of the words he chose to write was the word, PHRASE.

At that time, with my guidance via modeling, gesture, and verbal cues he typed the word PHRASE into the letter labeler, printed it out and stuck it to a turquoise blue piece of paper that he had picked to use that day.

I showed him how to get into an online dictionary on my phone to find the meaning of the word PHRASE.

We worked together to type the word PHRASE into the search bar of the dictionary and then we read the definition together.

I hand wrote with a pen next to his typed label, PHRASE, a shortened definition of what we read in the dictionary: “a sentence”.

I explained to him that I noticed one of his favorite sentences to hear was, “Go Phillies!” and how that was a great example of “a sentence”.

So on the paper next to the writings of the word PHRASE and the definition “a sentence”, I wrote out the phrase…… “Go Phillies!”

(photo: Zoom in to the left of the letter labeler to see the vocabulary work with PHRASE)

Looking back at that night when he was working on writing “Go Phillies!” fatigue was not why he took so long to select the next letter after PH.

It was because he was remembering what he had learned months before during our phonics and vocabulary activity.

He was trying to write the word PHRASE.

He was attempting to communicate that he understood that “Go Phillies” was a phrase.

He hit a home run and I missed it.

I totally missed it.

I blew it, just completely struck out.

Students with fluent speech or even semi-speaking could practice typing “Go Phillies!” and also simultaneously speak something along the lines of, “Hey mom, remember when we talked about ‘Go Phillies’ is a phrase”.

N tried to write the word PHRASE but my focus was on instructing him to write the planned word that he chose, PHILLIES, and I disrupted his spontaneous authentic communication that came out of that writing activity.

I know that it is a complete necessity for N to be taught literacy skills and how to motor plan sequencing letters to make words with alternative pencils.

After all direct, explicit instruction was the reason behind how he learned about the word PHRASE in the first place!

However, I learned from this experience that direct instruction and expectations can be a double edged sword for those with complex communication disabilities.

I learned the hard way, how fragile the boundaries between explicit instruction and spontaneous authentic communication are so razor thin.

While I want to provide equity and opportunity for learning for N, I now understand that if I am not especially careful to be exceedingly observant and curious, expectations can become a barrier rather than providing liberation.

For those who have complex communication needs, communication can be a whisper in the sea of a loud world.

It can be incredibly subtle and so easily missed.

I made sure to show N the video of him trying to write PHRASE, and the photo of our work on PH digraphs, and profusely apologized to him.

He was quite proud that I recognized the incredibleness of what he did, even though it was discovered after the fact.

I continually have to be reminded to forgive myself and see mistakes as an opportunity to grow.

Ever since then I am very careful to acknowledge and document all of N’s spellings whether they make sense to me at the moment or not.

In retrospect, if I could have a do-over, when he wrote PHR I would have printed that out and set it aside with great importance to investigate or revisit at a later time.

That way his writing and communication could have been honored even if I was not able to figure out what it meant in the spur of the moment.

I still would have gone back to teaching him to write out the word PHILLIES since he initially chose and planned to write that.

It is good to go back and finish up a solid plan, but there will always be room given to him to off to any tangents that he may want to go on.

I can continually grow and change right alongside him.

This event also confirmed to me that being given information in visual ways is vital to N’s growth.

He has always been a kind of person that takes the world in visually.

N best remembers and recalls information that he has physically seen with his eyes.

Some people might learn well with long streams of auditory information, but that is not the case for him.

He enjoys and thrives with visual experiences to help him acquire language, literacy, and knowledge.

He really enjoys looking at patterns in letters, words, remixing letters in words, and creating new words from existing words.

Even when he was younger, just a toddler, he amazed me with his artistic expressions with letters.

He would hold up wooden letters and rotate them.

He would take a letter C and rotate it to the left or right and say aloud, “U!”.

And he would take the letter W and rotate it all the way around and say aloud, “M!”.

At 2 years old, he once took two board books and laid them open side by side on the floor.

One book was opened to the page that had the word “ZOO” on it and in the other book the page was opened to the word “ZOOM”.

All these wonderful astonishing memories I have of him earlier in his life are still so vibrantly connected to where he is today.

A good while after his “home run” in writing to communicate and my “strike out” in recognizing it, we were doing a Halloween themed hidden pictures activity similar to the “Where’s Waldo” books.

In this activity there were hidden themed words along with hidden pictures to find.

I noted that the hidden words had double vowels, and he really does love double vowels!

I offered him an opportunity to practice typing them with the letter labeler.

I wrote the first word BOO and then he wrote it, printed it out and stuck it to a paper that we were using to store all his chosen typed words for that day.

Then I modeled typing SPOOKY.

N typed, SPOO and then quickly printed it out.

He placed it next to our writing of the word BOO.

BOO and SPOO.

It was his nice little pattern recognition and segmentation of a word, just as he still does with language chunks with the dropping words, adding or slotting in new words, and remixing words.

Not too long after the BOO SPOO writings, we had a beautiful sunny day after a long spell of many gloomy, cold, and rainy summer days.

While we were looking out the window, I went to the weather page on his AAC device and talked about how the weather had been rainy and now it was sunny.

I asked if he wanted to write the word SUN since we were enjoying it. He flapped the fidget in his hand with happiness.

I wrote the word SUN on a slip of paper, while also highlighting the three phonemes in sequence.

First, “sssssssss” then second “uuuhhhhh” and last “nnnnnnn”.

N typed S, then L.

I wondered aloud at his interesting selection of SL and told him to keep going.

He wrote IN to make the letter sequence SLIN and then printed it out.

I held up the label, read his word aloud phonetically “ssss-lllll-iiiiii-nnn”, but when I picked up the letter labeler and saw the screen I realized his cleverness.

On the letter labeler the digital letters SLIN visually look *very* similar to the letters SUN.

I applauded his artistry and showed him how with a pen we could ink in the little space on the paper label strip between the letters L and I to make it look even more like a U.

He looked at the label, smiled with satisfaction, and stuck it on the paper with all the other words he had explored.

In the past I might have seen his communication as limited if it did not look a certain way.

Once I realized that it is society’s ideas about communication that are limited, I was able to learn directly from him that communication can be untethered from neuronormative expectations.

He has taught me that there are so many different ways of seeing the same thing if I take the time to look and listen.

I am so grateful to have the opportunity to come to hold unconditional regard for all the many different ways he can communicate his ideas, thoughts, moods, and creativity.

His mind is so wonderfully made, and the unique connections he makes are something to marvel in.

And if he ever reads this blog or he has it read it to him I hope that he sees that in our family he is and has always has been our All-Star, our most valued player.

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, after many years of supporting N in his self directed pursuits in exploring literacy, the alphabet, and phonics, we began the process of working together to take very short bursts of time to learn phonics in a more explicit and sequential manner in the fall of 2022 after his development had matured in a way that he could better access a teacher led approach.

Throughout the time that we have explored explicit sequential phonics, we have learned about beginning initial sounds in words (a-z), beginning consonant blends (bl, gr, sl etc.), digraphs (sh, ph, wh, etc.), vowels, vowel teams (ai, ay, ee, ea, oo etc.), bossy R vowels (ar, er, ir, ur), and most recently touched on dipthongs (oi, oy, etc).

Early in my journey of supporting N with the motor planning skills needed for using alternative pencils, such as keyboards, I began with having him practice typing by choosing and copying meaningful to him short 2-3-letter words written on index cards (on, go, mom, dad etc.)

When we got to the letter teams in our work with phonics, we began working on motor planning longer words that were relevant to his everyday life.

While N has always loved big fancy words and has many beloved “phrases”, these would have been too exhausting in the beginning for him to motor plan typing.

We initially made sure to explore those longer and higher tier vocabulary words during other activities without the added pressure of writing or typing them.

It was becoming apparent that writing short, then longer single words, was becoming easier for him.

So I decided to tentatively dip into exposing him to practicing the motor planning skills for typing very simple multi word sentences.

When thinking about how to introduce typing sentences, I found an activity book that was geared towards younger children.

Since he has the soul of an artist, I thought he might enjoy looking at the vivid images in the book because they resembled his cherished Youtube music videos and Disney movies.

It also included short stories to go with the pictures that happened to be high interest topics for N such as washing a car, planting a seed, and making popcorn.

It seemed like an easy light introduction to typing short sentences that would not be too cognitively cumbersome.

As N does have ‘both’ motor and cognitive disabilities, his specific needs necessitate reducing cognitive demands as a practical way to support him to put the majority of his energy into learning the physical actions of typing.

The last story from that particular book that we used was the “Popcorn” story.

After reading the title together, I pointed out that we could type the word “popcorn” into the Spotify app to see if there was anything that might be fun to listen to.

We found a ‘popcorn’ white noise playlist.

The sound of popping popcorn kernels created the perfect ambiance to talk about each picture for the story of how popcorn was made via an electric popcorn popper.

Then I reminded N that he had some short home video clips of our very own popcorn popper in his high tech AAC device.

As we watched those home video clips I modeled writing some simple sentences on a favorite alternative pencil, a letter labeler.

”I see popcorn”

“Dad loves popcorn”

”I hear popcorn”

N enjoyed peeling the sticker paper off the label strips and placing them into the activity book.

I read aloud each sentence, then I asked him to choose one sentence from the three modeled sentences that he would like to practice typing.

He pointed to, “I hear popcorn”.

Using partial elements of a teaching strategy “graduated release of responsibility” (a.k.a. “I do, We do, You do”), I showed him how to start typing on a stationary letter labeler that was propped up on a book stand.

Starting with the letter “I”, I modeled touching the letter key then stepping back and allowing him to then reach for it himself.

Next, I modeled moving my finger down to the space bar at the bottom, then again gave him an opportunity to reach and get it himself.

Then back up to getting the letter “H”.

Next I showed him how to motor plan the sequence of the vowel team, EA.

He typed EE instead while gazing at the little screen that gave him visual feedback on what he was writing.

My intention for this activity was not to primarily focus on phonics, but rather to just get some practice motor planning and building motor memory for typing or keyboarding.

However, I was not about to get in the way of his spontaneous creative application of phonics knowledge.

I drew from my education on developmental spelling research which has multiple models of distinct stages, phases, and scales that describe as well as provide guidance in understanding how writing develops from scribbling on through to more complex words.

For beginning or emerging writers, spelling is not a clean cut path, rather, it is a messy process of exploration.

Emphasizing correctness of spelling is not a recommended practice for beginning writers because writing incorrect spellings are a normal part of early spelling and writing development.

For example, a beginning writer might write “I lk dgs” for “I like dogs”.

So I remarked to N, “yes, the vowel team EE does make the same sound as EA. You are so smart to remember that!”

Since phonetic or invented spelling is a normal process in early writing development and is a brand new skill emerging for N, I let it be.

I showed him how to select R, which made the statement, “I HEER”.

We moved on to the space bar, then up to the P for popcorn.

At the letter ‘O’, N methodically and determinedly selected OO, instead of just one letter O.

Thus, making the phrase, “I HEER POO”.

As a seasoned school teacher I sagely predicted the idea of what was coming.

P was the next letter, so I resignedly said, “well, carry on, get that P!”.

He selected a P, and quickly another letter P, before rushing to push print on the letter labeler.

I picked up the printed strip of paper and read his writing aloud, “I HEER POOPP.”

He shook the fidget tool gripped in his hand with an air of satisfaction.

This is the same person in my family who cackles with glee at the sound of the last of the ketchup being squirted out of an almost empty bottle.

I can’t say I was surprised at this particular injection of humor.

I said, “I am glad that you can write the word poop, that was pretty funny!…But since we were practicing writing the word popcorn, can we finish up by typing the word ‘corn’?

He contentedly obliged, by selecting the letter C when I pointed to it, then O, to which he responded by typing ‘OO’ again.

The written result ended up being, “COORN”, which he happily affixed next to the word “POOPP”.

So there we had it, “I HEER POOPPCOORN” in all of its double voweled glory.

Later while reflecting on this activity, I thought about how the ‘frame’ of the sentence, “I HEAR POPCORN”, provided a cognitive support for N be able to access and explore phonetic spelling.

While his ability to write is gradually improving he still is not able to independently write full words or phrases completely from scratch even though, due to hyperlexia, if they are put in front of him he can read them.

I am seeing more and more that having access to “frames” such as a whole word or an entire sentence frees up the cognitive load for N to be able to explore phonics by slotting in new and different sounds in words.

This frame and slot style that is so prevalent in his infrequent spontaneous spoken language is also becoming present in his writing development.

This is all very interesting because while we have not yet formally tapped into it, N is innately using a strategy that aligns with the ‘Comprehensive Literacy for All’ framework’s recommendation of utilizing keywords and word walls while writing with students with significant disabilities.

This approach involves visually displaying known keywords as a cognitive support to access writing new words.

For example, a student can use a word wall with displayed known taught keywords such as “make” to then spell or write a new word such as “bake”.

All the student has to do is swap out the letter M, slot in the letter B, and then copy down the remaining letters of the rime -ake to create the word “bake”.

Being given the adaptation of visual access to a “whole” helps N to more easily see and manipulate the “parts” whether it be language, phonics, or writing.

Using cognitive supports has been a source of great empowerment for N, he is thriving and progressing with them.

While he does live with cognitive disabilities, he still very much has talents, areas of strengths, and a positive self image.

I know this to be true because this past winter, his respite caregiver excitedly reported that they were watching the superhero movie, “The Incredibles”.

During one scene, she commented, “That's so smart.”

Unexpectedly, N turned to look at her and quietly spoke no truer words, “N so smart.”

In closing, later that night after practicing typing the popcorn sentence we made popcorn and cookies.

I could not resist elaborating on his earlier wisecrack as we prepared this delectable snack by writing on a small whiteboard:

“We’re making poopcoorn and cookies”

When I held it out to show him what I wrote, N gave it a side glance, and let’s just say I think he ‘APPROOVED’.

My posts on this page will tend to go in peaks and valleys, much like N’s development in communication, language and literacy.

During the valleys, his growth looks more horizontal. 

He makes gradual gains in areas that peaked in the past.

Sometimes this looks like more silence, a content contemplative time.

During the peaks, new growth unexpectedly comes forth.

Watching him grow is also like watching a flower bloom in a slow motion video.  

All the tiniest details that normally get missed, become clearly apparent.

I have come to see that sometimes slower is more beautiful.

In supporting N, I get to see this growth in all of its glory over very long periods of time.

This page is about taking time to explore optimal supports for just one person.

It is descriptive rather than prescriptive, which means the supports used here may not be what is best for another person.

The title of this page, “N of 1”, is partially inspired by the name of a scientific experimental process for research where different things are tried with just one person rather than a whole entire group.  

To support N’s communication, language, and literacy I flexibly use elements of Natural Language Acquisition, AAC, Comprehensive Literacy for All, alternative pencils, science of reading aligned synthetic phonics, occupational therapy, self directed learning/unschooling, constructivist teaching, graduated release of responsibility, and adapted prompting hierarchies.

My hope is that you will read our story and be empowered, emboldened, and braver to explore ways to provide optimal support to people with complex disabilities. 

Now back to the peaks and valleys.

Recently there has been a peak in literacy development. 

After many years of supporting N’s self directed exploration of the alphabet and phonics, we have been exploring adult supported systematic explicit phonics since the fall of 2022. 

N is hyperlexic and was practically born reading. 

However he has dyspraxia too, which deeply affects his ability to motor plan or sequence actions. 

This affects his ability to write and spell because those skills bear dependence on being able to physically arrange and sequence letters in a specific order.

Along with phonics instruction, he has gotten instruction and coaching to be able to use alternative pencils (e.g. keyboards) much like how young humans get instruction on how to form or write by hand letters, words, and sentences with a pencil.

While N does get opportunities to use alternative pencils to just “scribble” or freely explore, in order to learn to write he needs times of adult facilitation on how to motor plan forming letters, words, and ultimately sentences. 

With this explicit instruction to type, he has gradually improved in selecting letters on a keyboard just once and then pulling his hand back rather than holding a key down or rapidly pushing single letter keys which create long strings of the same letter. 

On his own, he is beginning to apply and express his phonics knowledge during these set aside times of learning to type. 

Many times when we were exploring phonics in a structured way, he didn’t always seem like he was listening. 

His accuracy in expressing what he learned during structured phonics activities is fair, mostly in the 60-70% range, basically a grade of C- .

I choose to not be obligated to perfection, or even near perfection.

I do choose to obligate myself to provide unconditional opportunities to engage with meaningful literacy within a variety of ‘purpose-full’ authentic experiences that N is a willing happy participant in. 

He has the right to learn to write and we must carry on.

Below there is a spontaneous unplanned video recording that shows how far he has come in both motor planning typing and his knowledge of phonics to write. 

He also appears to make an error in letter selection while writing a word.

I was so busy trying to hold the camera and provide coaching that I actually missed the moment when the stray keystroke happened. 

N wrote the word in its entirety with no interruptions from me. 

When I put the camera down and looked at what he wrote, it did take a moment for me to see his cleverness unveiled.

It was a revelation of his flair for being fancy with sounds, letters and words.

Similar “stray” letter selections ended up happening two more times in other typing activities during that week.

I caught on to it the first couple times he added his inventive twists on words, but the third time my anticipation distracted me and I failed to get it.

The third time was the most amazing one too. N hit it so far out of the ballpark that I was so sad to have missed the opportunity to give him the credit he deserved in real time.

But alas, I can learn from my mistakes.

I can take example from N’s often infectious happiness, to rest in the joy in the morning, a new start, a fresh day to be discovered.

This video is the first typing activity captured in a series of stories where I be sharing our “phun with phonics”.  

So stay tuned in.

I hope you en-JOY the video! 

(since the Youtube video is primarily in slides, a description summary is in the Youtube video description for those who may need it) 

Phun with Phonics

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