Early Childhood Special Education and Assistive Technology Blog

By: Carrie Portrie , M.Ed, EC-SEAT Project Coordinator Our world is filled with screens, colors, lights, sounds, and textures. Children are being asked to do more, perform in certain ways and sit in classrooms where often they must sit still while dealing with an overload of sensory input from the environment. What can we do as educators to create more universally designed and inclusive spaces for young children with sensory sensitivities? Recently, I can across a website called A Sensory Life . The website is created by Angie Voss, OTR. I was drawn towards the site because I enjoy providing sensory activities for young children in the classroom. One particular part of her site I enjoyed was the SquishBox . Do you remember as a child climbing into cabinets, trying to fit into hampers, making forts or trying to fit in other cozy spaces? Well, the squish box is like that. You can make them with everyday items or inexpensive, easily found materials for children in your classroom or at ...

CAST UDL Professional Learning Free Webinar Series (http://www.cast.org/pd/WebinarSeries/index.html) is offering a free webinar on   Wednesday, February 26 from 11:00am to 12:00pm. This particular webinar discusses Universal Design for Learning (UDL) theory and practice with authors Anne Meyer, David Rose, and David Gordon who recently wrote a book by the same name. The Technical Assistance Center on Social Emotional Intervention (TACSEI) offers a wide variety of web-based presentations for FREE on their website http://www.challengingbehavior.org/explore/presentations_workshops.htm. TACSEI focuses on promoting evidence-based practices to improve social-emotional outcomes for young children with or in risk of developmental delays or disabilities. Project CONNECT (http://connect.fpg.unc.edu/),as mentioned in other blog posts, is a great site created by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (http://www.fpg.unc.edu/) at the University of North Carolina at Chap...

Oftentimes so much time goes into supporting children with special needs, that there siblings may be inadvertently over looked and may need extra support and mentoring. Easter Seals recently did a study about siblings who will become the caregivers later on in life of their brothers and sisters with disability. Writer Rachel Adams shares in The New York Times’ her maternal reflections about the subject in her article Growing up With a Disabled Sibling . Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics also published a study in May 2013 testing “whether siblings of children with disability had higher levels of parent-reported behavioral and emotional functional impairment compared with a peer group of siblings residing with only typically developing children.” Children with disabilities and their siblings can have special relationships as we can see from this video from the King County (Seattle, WA) Developmental Disabilities Division of Early Intervention. ...

Initiatives throughout the state of New Hampshire are seeking to train professionals and family members about assistive technology. NH Family Voices is among those organizations with the mission to bring family-centered care to children and youth with special health care needs and/or disabilities in NH. NH Family Voices is part of a national network of similar advocacy initiative that provide families with information and methods to make informed decisions about the services their children receive. I saw a new training shared by a NH Family Voices staff member regarding a new and free online and in-person training for NH school districts (K-12) regarding the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). The NH AAC initiative , housed at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire will provide access to online learning modules, state and national resources regarding AAC. This initiative is open to individuals affiliated with K-12 schools in NH, including: ...