by This fact right here might be one of my favorites. Visual supports are SO incredibly important for learning, especially for AJ.
Once we realized this, I pushed hard to make sure that we had tools for him. We made flash cards, read books, and I even hunted down the lowercase alphabet for the leap frog fridge toy and had it sent over all the way from London.
(Side note – it will be my own fault later if AJ officially says “zed” for the letter “Z”)
What I didn’t realize is how much sign language also played a part in visual learning in other areas too.
We model sign language on a pretty consistent basis. At first we were modeling it so that he could learn to communicate with the people around him. It slowly started to become clear though that AJ understood what we were saying better when we would also utilize sign language along with our spoken words.
AJ learns at a much faster rate when we are able to use a combination of signs, spoken language, modeling and something physical and tangible that he can touch. You’ll often notice that when we ask him a question about a color, number, letter, image, etc that he will almost always have to point at or touch the object before he will proceed to answer the question.
Knowing these “small” facts makes a big difference when we are able to incorporate them as he is learning new things.
