Setback?

After the initial success in Jason's reading adventure, we have a couple more of those good days where Jason paid attention to his task and showed us he was able to match pictures to words. However, it seems like we are experiencing some minor setback at this time. The setback seems to be behavioral in nature. It's like him telling me he doesn't want to spend the rest of the summer doing this. That leads me to pause and rethink my teaching strategies. One thing I realized is that, by asking him to perform those tasks like matching, am I really "teaching" him or am I "testing" him. If I imagined myself to be in Jason's shoes, I would not be too happy if I showed you I CAN do something one day, yet was required to prove it again day after day. So what we have observed in the past few days was his refusal to pay visual attention to the cards, and random manipulation/fidgeting/mouthing of the cards. Before I have a solution to this problem, I introduced some new manual/fine motor tasks for him, like stacking cups and counting with objects. This seems to engage him better but I still have to find better ways to "teach" literacy.

I have made a computer Book using Classroom Suite 4 and he really likes it. A second one is in the making. We are also experimenting with errorless writing using step scanning. Step scanning is a means of menu selection using 2 switches, one switch to scan through the options, another to "pick up" the choice. But one limitation of this program is the absence of user-specific setting to avoid "sticky" buttons. So as Jason hits the button, the program flies through the options making it a messy and confusing scan. This is a major drawback in making this a clean learning experience. I have yet to find more alternatives. As the Chinese saying goes, "if one wants to perfect the task, one should sharpen his tools". I hope I will be enlightened with some new ways some day with the help of better software.