SLIDE 1\
Welcome. My name is Susan Bushinski, and I'm really thrilled to have the chance to talk with you for a little while today about calendar systems. You might say, "Calendar system? PDA? What? What are we talking about?" The phrase calendar system has a unique meaning when we're talking about educational programs for learners who experience deaf-blindness, and that's the context, of course, in which we'll talk about this concept today. I have been provided with this opportunity to talk with you about calendar systems for the Kansas State Deaf-Blind Project, and I appreciate this very much and thank them. During the session today, we'll talk about really what a calendar system is for a learner with deaf-blindness, what purposes it can serve, how you make one, how you implement one, and just important things to keep in mind. So I hope you'll find it helpful. Here we go.\
SLIDE 2\
What is a calendar system? It has a lot of names. Maybe you've never heard the phrase calendar system before, but you've heard anticipation shelf, or maybe anticipation calendar. Same thing, or essentially the same. Maybe you've heard this thing called a sequence box, an object calendar, a tactile schedule. Any of those things would apply to the content about which we'll talk today. So if you have previous experience or previous knowledge associated with any of those labels, bring that to mind and think about that as we talk about calendar systems today. The bottom line, a calendar system uses tangible or tactile representations as a means of documenting a series of activities. Long definition, but there at the bottom of your screen, you see that long definition. It's a tangible way to document a series or a sequence of activities.\
SLIDE 3\
So using tangible representations and calendar systems. A calendar is a concrete representation of daily activities in which a student will routinely engage. We'll talk more about that as we go through this slideshow today. It really is used to help a learner who is deaf/blind develop the concept of sequence, or the notion "Time is passing." I like that if you want to reduce the whole notion of, "What is a calendar system? What does it do? What does it teach?" It helps a learner who is deaf/blind realize and begin to understand "Time is passing." It's a general notion of time. It's not telling time on a clock. It's not that kind of issue. But general time, and in the sense of a daily, weekly, yearly calendar time goes by.\
SLIDE 4\
So it's very important, and this may seem a little bit out in left field, but it is essential to the idea of calendar system to realize that calendars involve many elements of emotional attachment. And we're going to look at the history of this, where this comes from, in just a moment. But calendars involve trying to engage the learner with things, with items, with remnants, with tangible things, to try and encourage the learner with whom we're working or the child in your own home, to entice her to come out of her body. Kids with deaf-blindness really live internally, inside themselves, until we help them learn there's a world out there, and it's an exciting place and it's a safe place, and we want you to come join us and do things in the world, experience objects and people in the world. So come on out of your body and join us here. But bottom line, it's an issue of safety. It's an issue of emotional safety, so we have to not neglect this idea of emotional attachment when we're trying to construct a tangible way to help your children, the learners with whom you work, begin to interact with objects that represent the passage of time int he world and what we do with our time in the world.\
SLIDE 5\
Very, very simply, if you don't want to jump in with both feet up to your eyeballs, it's easy to begin with three simple elements. You could begin with a Now box, a Later box, and a Finished box. Now, Later, Finished. That's enough. Calendars can become very sophisticated, as you will see. But bottom line, that's the essence of a calendar system. And each trip to the anticipation shelf or to the calendar box, or to the calendar system, I've used these different phrases throughout the slideshow to try to get us comfortable with using each of them. Each trip to that calendar system is a lesson in itself. It's not simply a transition. You don't just run over there, grab a thing, grab an object, grab a representation, and move on. When you are going to be using a calendar system with a learner, you need to take your time, preview what's going on, review what has gone on, and always, always, always, place the representations from the calendar system into a "Finished" box when that particular activity has been concluded.\
SLIDE 6\
Why do we want to use a calendar system? Well, a calendar helps a learner begin to understand such concepts as next, finished, work, break, more work, those kinds of ideas. When set up correctly, a calendar system reinforces a practice of working sequentially from left to right. That's the way our world works. We read from left to write. Kids will read braille or process braille from left to right. We orient from left to right, so when we're setting up a calendar system, we will work from left to right as well. Another very strong benefit of using a calendar system is that it provides a learner with the security of knowing what is going to happen to her next. Okay? And this really is very, very important going back to that notion of emotional attachment, emotional security, emotional safety. A calendar system is an anchor for a learner, and it really does offer that notion of, "This is what you are going to do next. This is what I'm going to help you to do next. This is what we are going to do with you next." And again, I just don't want to underestimate the importance of this emotional security, emotional safety feature.\
SLIDE 7\
Other reasons-- a little more pragmatic reasons-- that we use a calendar system: it helps the learner, helps your child to begin to perceive the world as an organized place, helps the learner to begin to be able to predict what will come next. We just finished this. Next we're going to do that. That's why sometimes we hear the phrase anticipation calendar or anticipation box, because when you are involved in the act of prediction to say what will come next, you are showing the ability to anticipate. And that's point two on your screen right now. A calendar system gives the learner some things to anticipate.\
Another thing that classroom teachers will typically hang onto as a real strong feature of calendar systems-- and it may help parents at home as well if you routinely follow a sequence of events when you're trying to help your child get prepared to eat or get prepared for bed or in the morning to get dressed and ready for school-- use of a calendar system can help to reduce a learner's resistance to change. Sometimes learners who have deaf-blindness have difficulty with transitions. They find them to be a challenge. I think this goes back, at least in part, to that notion of emotional safety. When you can't really see the world very well, when you can't really hear what's going on in the world very well, you develop some sense of comfort in what you're doing at the moment. And then somebody is saying, "You've got to put that away and go do something else," or "You've got to go to a different location and do something else." It's like, "Yikes!" It's scary. "Where is it going to be? What's it going to be? I'm feeling comfortable here right now. I don't want to change. I don't want to go do anything else." We have to remember that emotional safety element, and if you've used or if you are using a calendar system it can help reduce that anxiety associated with transition. It can help reduce a learner's resistance to changing activities, changing settings, changing locations, and that sort of thing. A calendar system does alert the learner to the fact that an unexpected change in routine might occur through the notion of a surprise card or a wild card, and we'll talk about that.\
SLIDE 8\
More reasons why to use a calendar system. We're going to front-load this with reasons why this is important and try to entice you with curiosity and interest to build a calendar system when we're finished. A calendar system allows a learner many, many opportunities to communicate with another person. And if you've had the opportunity to review any of the other webinars in this series produced by the Kansas Deaf-Blind Project, you'll see that in so many ways everything is linked to communication or everything has to do with some aspect of communication. Because bottom line, for learners who experience deaf-blindness, that's what we need to do. That's what we owe those kids is to help them build a system for communication. Calendar systems set the stage for a learner to actively engage in decision making about her day. So many decisions get made for learners, for children who have deaf-blindness. Calendar systems are a way to help involve the kids in making at least some of those decisions. Calendar systems may facilitate the development of symbolization or symbolic communication skills. The Kansas Deaf-Blind Project has another presentation on that very topic. But the use of a calendar system can certainly facilitate the development of symbolization ability. And finally, I guess the reason this is in red, it's maybe not the most important, but it's my favorite so I made it in red, is the idea that a calendar system for a learner with deaf-blindness is like an individualized timepiece, an individualized clock, an individualized time-telling device. Hopefully, that will make more sense as we proceed.\
SLIDE 9\
This is one image. I've taken it from a website from Ontario, Canada. Many deaf-blind projects throughout the country have images and different information about using calendar systems. This is not necessarily the absolute best, but this is a very clear picture of what a three-unit or a three-element calendar system might look like. This one is made out of wood. We will talk in a few minutes about how you might construct the frame for a calendar system. Obviously, if you build it out of wood like this, it's going to be much more permanent. It will be much more durable. That's fantastic. But if you don't have the money, the talent, the tools to build something out of wood, there are lots of alternatives that I'll share with you.\
And it looks as though these are representations from some type of a grooming activity, so we could call this an activity calendar. It looks like there's something that the learner could use to actually take a bath or take a shower, to use liquid soap and wash. A shaver, and I can't tell. It looks like it's some kind of a bag, maybe where the learner could carry his clothes that he's going to put on after the bath or after the shower. As you'll see as we proceed, the representations that are used in a calendar system may be actual objects, as the first two of these are that are on your screen right now. They may be a representation that is tactility similar or a texture that matches something that's going to be used in the activity. We need to link the representations with the elements of the activities as closely as we can.\
Something just to keep in mind, there's not one right way to select the representations you'll use. The bottom line is you want to select representations that will be preferred by the learner and meaningful to the learner. If you can't think of something that's meaningful initially, that's okay. But you need to choose things with which you can build a meaningful connection as you work with the materials over time.\
SLIDE 10\
There really is many options for the time frames that can be used in calendar systems as there are ideas. You can use an anticipation calendar for a single activity, like the next future activity. You'll go back to something I said a few minutes ago. A Now box, a Later box, and a Finished box. That's the very rudimentary, most simple anticipation calendar. One activity, for now, the next future activity done. Okay? More often in classrooms, you'll tend to see a daily activity calendar which would be a sequence of boxes. We'll say that for now, if you think back to this image, okay? The number of boxes. Most people will say, "You should have a least 3, and no more than 8." I don't take that as an absolute. I take that as a guideline. I surely believe 21 is too many, but if you need 9, I don't think that you've committed a crime by going up to 9. The [inaudible] guideline is 3, as you see here, up to 9 units.\
So if you're going to make a daily activity calendar, and you can fit it into-- you can reduce it. You can represent the daily activities with, approximately, 8 different elements. Then, you could create a calendar system for the entire school day. More often than not, I'll see teachers and I really encourage teachers with whom I work to split the day into two parts to create a morning activity calendar, or a morning calendar system, and an afternoon calendar system. It just allows you to better represent each of the elements in which a learner will engage, each of the activities in which a learner will engage, and lunch is typically a logical place at which to split the day. Maybe AM, maybe PM.\
Once a learner has grasped this notion of using a calendar system, there are expanded options that are available. There is a reference at the end of this slideshow to a book titled "Calendars" that's available through the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Again, it's on the final slide with which we'll conclude this talk today. And that resource is really outstanding for presenting information about expanded calendar systems. It presents how you could build a weekly calendar. How you can build a monthly calendar. How you can build an annual calendar. And those, as you can see, are very, very sophisticated because children would have certainly grasped the notion of time, in general, that time passes and time is broken into weeks. Time is broken into months, and so on and so forth. That's certainly not the place at which you want to begin.\
SLIDE 11\
So here is one example-- I don't have a pictorial example, but I think having seen what a calendar system might look like we can imagine this in our minds. For this particular activity calendar, there would be five of those units, five of those wooden boxes attached side-to-side. One for each step in the activity itself. The activity is making chocolate milk. And for the step of pouring milk in the blender, the representation in the calendar system would be a milk carton. Not the actual milk carton, it would be a part of the top of the milk carton that is attached to some kind of cardstock, the top of a plastic milk carton. Whatever kind of milk you use with your child at home, or whatever type of milk carton you use in your classroom at school. The second step: you're going to pour chocolate syrup into the blender. So you're going to have the squeeze bottle top of the chocolate syrup bottle. Third step: Put the lid on the blender. So you're going to have some kind of lid for the blender. Blend ten seconds. So you would have a switch possibly that the learner's going to use to turn the blender on. Then you're going to pour the milk in the glass. So you might have a plastic sports bottle.\
Again, I would use this opportunity to encourage you. If you're thinking of the steps, you just break down a task into the pieces and parts with which a learner will participate or will participate partially; just do a little bit of, but be actively engaged. The column on the right is wide open. These are not the only five representations that could be used. You could choose to use, if the learner has absolutely no sight at all, you could build a system of textures. And one texture means milk carton, and one texture means chocolate syrup bottle, and so on, and so forth. I've seen teachers build cards with puffy paint with different configurations of puffy paint dots, puffy paint lines, diagonals, squiggles, to represent different things. Now, you might say, "Oh, Susan that is really strange." Well, it's strange to us because we see and we have visual images in our head all the time. As you look at the right-hand column on your screen, you visualize what those things look like. A learner who has no vision, has no visual reference at all. And with time and teaching, through instruction, that learner can hold the textures tactilely in her mind, and feel those textures, and link them with the steps on the left. So again, it's wide open in terms of what the representations themselves would be.\
The only thing that I would caution you about is you should never ever, ever, never use miniatures as representations for a learner with a significant vision loss. For example, you might say, "Well, for a blender I'm going to go to a curiosity shop and buy a two-inch blender. And that would be a perfect representation for step number four." And I would suggest to you, "It really is not appropriate because that little two-inch blender is nothing like the real thing." It doesn't have moving parts. It's likely plastic, where a real blender is heavier metal, more durable. Weight-wise the miniature doesn't match. With the miniatures, the parts don't move. The little switches don't move. The lid doesn't come off. The texture feels entirely different. That two-inch blender would work for you or for me because we know what a real blender looks like. But a learner with a significant vision loss does not have that reference. So although the right-hand column is wide open, in terms of what you would choose, please do not use miniatures as representational forms in calendar systems.\
SLIDE 12\
Here's another example where I've expanded from an activity calendar to a daily calendar, and this matches up with what we discussed a few minutes ago. This will be a morning schedule only for a particular learner. And there would be a second-- we would restock, if you will, the calendar system structure for the afternoon schedule and the afternoon activities. And instead of step-by-step-by-step for each of these activities, listed the five major routines that this young man would do when he comes to school in the morning. He gets there earlier than everybody else, so he's going to feed the classroom animals. There are machines most school programs in schools for the blind, some public schools, who serve learners with blindness will have a Thermoform machine. It just takes plastic and makes raised forms of any type of object. So you could put food pellets on the Thermoform machine platform, lay the piece of plastic over it, it's heated up, the plastic melts over the food pellets. After it cools, the food pellets drop out, but you have a piece of plastic with the shape and the size of the actual food pellets, and you can Thermoform almost anything. So in that instance, that might be a representation. The second routine for this young man is grooming. He needs to clean up for the day. The reason the teachers sequenced it this way is this young man comes from-- or we're pretending, I made this guy up. But we're pretending that this guy comes from a home where the family doesn't have a lot of resources. Grooming is difficult. He's in a high school, and he really needs to be conscious and learn the issues of body odor and to keep himself clean so that he will be more welcome in social interactions with his peers. So we're going to have him feed the animals first, and then as he gets dirty possibly from feeding and doing something with the animals' cages, then he'll groom, and we might have a remnant of a washcloth there. Then, he's going to be engaged in some pre-Braille activities. We might have an enlarged model of a Braille cell that's made with any type of raised material. It could be puffy paint, it could be parts of ping-pong balls. It just depends on what that young man needs. Then, he will engage in another literacy activity with an adapted book. We might create a squishy book page that would represent books and literacy in general. And then, he will help to prepare for lunch, so we might use some kind of a thick plastic rectangle that might have the same feel, hopefully would have the same texture or feel as the cutting board in the classroom that he will use to help cut the celery, or dice the potatoes they're going to cook, or cut the bread for the sandwiches, or whatever it is with which he will engage that day. Once again, the routines are listed for an individual learner on the left, the representations are chosen with that individual learner's preferences with logical connections to each of the routines on the right. But there's not one absolutely correct idea.\
SLIDE 13\
When you're developing a calendar system, it is absolutely critical to remember that the system needs to mirror the learner's individual routine. If you're a classroom teacher or a classroom assistant and there are two learners with deaf-blindness in your classroom, please don't think you can create one calendar system that will work for both of the learners. No. Each learner needs his or her own individual calendar. Remember, we said it's an individual timepiece. Secondly, activity routines need to be developed in order to have something that the calendar is going to represent. Routines give meaning to the function of those objects or those representations in the calendar units. There is another webinar available through the Kansas Deaf-Blind Project on routines and developing routines. So if this is something that's uncomfortable to you, you might want to check that one out. Finally, I think it's critical that a calendar system be developed in conjunction with the learner's communication program. As we said earlier, you don't rush through grabbing something out of the calendar system. It's not a get it and go kind of thing. Interacting with the representation in the various units or elements of the calendar system, that might take 20 minutes. It might take 30 minutes. That's okay. It is not just the transition to whatever comes next. That is the meat and potatoes, the core of the learner's communication instructional program.\
SLIDE 14\
So how do you make one? What materials can you use? For a very permanent display, you might use wood like the one we saw previously, but I would be hard-pressed to have to make one out of wood. Mine would be wobbly and falling apart so I would have to go with other options. I've just listed a few here for you. Plastic baskets. Any dollar store, Walmart, Target, sells long and narrow ones. Wider, rectangles, any type of plastic basket. You always want to use the same size in one learner's calendar system. And you'll want to attach these to one another with superglue, with twist ties, with any kind of anything that will keep them together. You don't want them coming apart. They need to be one unit. And you would stand the baskets on end, so they would be open from the front as were those wooden units or those wooden elements in the picture of the calendar system we saw. You could use cut out milk cartons. If you still use the waxed covered cardboard, you can cut off the top and cut out one side and staple those milk cartons together. Those work great. They're not very durable. If they're used routinely, they'll wear out. They'll get torn. They'll get bent. I don't have a problem with that. That just means it's being used. But you will have to rebuild that structure or that framework for the calendar system, but they work fine. Some people use plastic gallon milk jugs and cut the tops off and then staple or glue or tie with yarn those together side by side. Shoe boxes work great. The one challenge with shoe boxes is you need to get shoe boxes that are all the same size. They need to be the same width. They need to be the same height when you turn them on end, so they're open from the front. It really is important that the size is uniform because the calendar frame needs to be presented as a single unit. Another thing that I have purchased in the past, these are a little more expensive, but different office supply stores will sell plastic magazine holders that are open on one side. And you can use those and use zip ties to tie those together or glue them together. Again, lots of choices. I'm sure that you can creatively think of things I haven't listed for you. But make sure you secure them side by side. Stand them on end, so they're open from the front like the wooden frame we viewed previously.\
SLIDE 15\
So I've tried to provide a series of numbered steps of how you can make a calendar system. Number one: determine the learner's daily schedule. This is with presuming you're going to go with a full-day schedule. You could divide it into an AM schedule, PM schedule. And then you would do this twice. But you determine the learner's daily schedule, select what the representations are going to be. Number three: if the representations are not actual objects to be used in the course of the activity then you want to mount them on card stock, or foam core board, or something heavy. And the purpose of that\'a0is to help the learner distinguish when that representation or that cue, is the object itself or when it is just a representation of the object itself. The cues or the representations aren't used in the activity, they stand for the actual objects that are used in the activity.\
Number four: you're going to construct your schedule box or your display unit out of any of those materials we just discussed. You want to prepare some kind of a mechanism for handling completed elements. Some kind of a finished box, a finished laundry basket, a finished tub, a plastic bucket, something that says these are done. It is important, number six, to include at least three elements. As we said, the most rudimentary one would be now, later, finished. And then you are going to arrange the objects or arrange the representations sequentially in the calendar display from left to right in the order in which you're going to complete the activities they represent. Implementation. Step number one is very, very important. The teacher's with whom I work, if they make an error in implementing a calendar system with a learner, this is the aspect they most often miss.\
SLIDE 16\
It really is important at the beginning of each day you want to review with the learner all of the elements in the calendar system. You want to start at the left, and if there are eight units or eight sections in the calendar system, you have the learner reach into the first one on the left, feel it, touch it, experience it. You name it for the learner. You name it verbally. You name the activity it represents. You name it verbally if the learner can hear. If the learner doesn't hear, use sign. If the learner doesn't see, you use tactile sign. And even if at the learner's current point in communication and development you're not sure they understand that sign or that name, you still want to say that name, give that sign to try to build that association. Then, you leave that representation in the first unit, tactically feel to the second unit. Feel, experience the second representation. You name it, either verbally or by signing. Leave that in it's place. Tactically feel to the next unit to the right. Experience that representation, have it named, and so on, and so forth until you get to the end of the left-to-right sequence. If there are six, you do that six times. If there are eight, you do that eight times. However many there are, you experience them all.\
Then, point number two, after experiencing each representation, you take the learner back to the very first unit, or the very first section of the calendar system, and that's when she can reach in, take the representation out, as point number three on your screen now says, and then proceed to complete that activity. Now, if you're going to need to set this calendar system frame up for the morning for eight activities, and then have a second set of representations for an afternoon schedule, after lunch, then you're going to review all eight or all six, however many there are, when you return from lunch when the new system is set up. You go back to point number one and review them all, and then go back and take the representation out of the first unit. As point number three goes on to say, after the learner has removed the representation from the first unit, typically the learner will take that with her to the workstation, to her desk, put in on her wheelchair tray to wheel or to have you wheel her to where she's actually going to complete that activity. It stays there on display while the learner is completing that activity. When it is concluded, with that representation in hand, the learner wheels back, walks back, is wheeled back to the location of the calendar box, and the learner drops that in the finished box, or the finished tub, or the bucket, or the laundry basket, whatever it is, which you want to locate at the far right end of the entire calendar. Because then, from left to right, when the morning's activities are finished, all of those units, the child can check, they're all empty, and boom, all of the representations are in the finished box. It's kind of a wordy explanation.\
SLIDE 17\
After the learner has dropped, placed the representation for the first activity in the finish box, then you go back to the calendar, fill the first empty space. You don't guide the learner's hand to the next unit or opening that has a representation inside it. No, no, no. It's the notion of time is passing. Go back to the far left end. Fill the empty space. Move onto the next unit to the right. If that one's also empty, fill it also. Fill that one empty. Move [tactfully?] onto the next unit. Reach in, "Ah, there's something in there." Select that next representation, and repeat. You name the activity that represents for the learner. If she can't handle that representation alone, maybe you're going to have a bag in which she's going to drop it, or you're going to place it on a wheelchair tray, place it in the learner's lap. You're going to have some way to take that representation with the learner to the setting in which that activity will be completed. Maybe it's a music room. Fine. Then it goes down three hallways in the school to the music room. If you decide you want to try something like this at home and you're using a representation for, "Okay. We're going to go take your bath," the representation is it goes with the child and you into your bathroom.\
If you're going to have something for feeding, the child uses a feeding pump. So you're maybe going to have a piece of tubing as a representation for being fed, and that piece of tubing goes with you into the kitchen or into the family room where the child was going to be fed. When you're done with whatever the activity is, that representation, the tubing, the sponge for the bath, whatever the representation is, you go back. You take it back to the calendar, jump it, drop it, push it into that finished box, and then return to the calendar. Start at the far left, empty, empty, empty, 'til you find the next unit with a representation. You're going to return to that calendar before the beginning of every single activity that has a representation there throughout the day. Sometimes it's effective, and point number six. Six is really an option. Some teachers choose to have a learner exchange the representation for the materials that he might need to complete a designated activity. For example, in the feeding activity that I just described, a family might choose to use at home. If the representation is a piece of the tubing, when the family and the learner arrive at the location where the tube feeding is going to happen, and it's in the family room with everybody else who's watching a show on TV or in the kitchen when everybody else is eating dinner, the learner might be prompted to pick up and display or give that tubing to his father who's going to hook him up to the machine. And that is just another opportunity for communication. The materials exchange is an option, but not a requirement for using a calendar system effectively.\
SLIDE 18\
Helpful hints. Lots of helpful hints. It's very important to develop a unique set of calendar components for each learner. Number two: always, always, always, always use the same representation for any given activity. If you're going to have an activity for tube feeding at home, it always needs to be the same thing. If you choose tubing, it always needs to be tubing. If you're going to use a calendar at home for bath time, and you're going to use a sponge, it always, always, always has to be a sponge. At school if you're-- let's go back to the example we visually viewed together. If the shaver is going to represent, "You need to shave your face now," it always needs to be that shaver. If that electric razor breaks, and you have to buy a different sort, doesn't matter. The broken one that's always been used that won't function as the shaver needs to be the same representation. And then that one could be exchanged as another element of communication for the razor that is functional that will be used to shave the face, and so on and so forth.\
Which leads to number three: to save yourself and the learner a lot of frustration and angst, when you decide on representations for a learner's calendar system, if you can, get multiples of them because they get lost, they get misplaced, they get dropped, they get broken. And, whoops, it really creates a hardship. If something gets lost and you can't replace it, can you make it past that challenge? Of course you can. But it is a much, much easier way to go if when you're going to buy a certain kind of a lid, buy two or three or four of them. If you're going to create thermoforms of food pellets for feeding the animals, make three or four all at the same time so that you have multiples so that if one is misplaced, lost, damaged, you're ready to go. Just replace it with a identical copy.\
Number four: choose representations that are linked in some way to each activity or are an actual part of the activity, as we've said. Then you're going to set up the calendar system by placing the representations left to right in each unit to correspond with the order in which the activities will happen throughout the school day.\
SLIDE 19\
All right. Number six. Include a cue to represent something that's like downtime or free time. It really is important especially with kids who have issues with stamina and endurance. If they're going to have a time to rest for 10 minutes between some pretty demanding activities or just because you as a family need some time where the child or the young adult is going to be alone or a teacher needs to leave a child to be by herself in the classroom-- not totally alone but to be alone to relax or rest while the other kids are being moved or changed or something that needs to be represented in the calendar system as well with downtime, break time. One of my favorites to use when representing that is the plastic bubble wrap. That's because for me I love to pop the plastic bubbles in the plastic bubble wrap and it's just a brainless kind of free time activity. It can be anything but that just shows you be creative.\
Seven. It's also very important when you are building a communication-- pardon me. A calendar system. When you're building a calendar system for a learner, you want to think in terms of something that will be a wildcard. Some researchers call it a surprise card. It just means there's going to be something that can be used to denote a very unusual event in the course of a calendar for the course of the school day. School pictures, once a year. You do not need a unique representation for school pictures. Field days, special Olympics, once or twice year. You don't need a special representation for that. If you try to come up with special representations, particularly if you're creating things with textures or that are just tactile representations, you're going to run out of designs or they're going to get so complicated and so similar, they'll be difficult for some learners to process.\
So for things that do not happen routinely, you can create a wildcard. For a child that has some vision, you might create a star on a piece of heavy foam [inaudible] that is silver glitter. And it's just this wild, big, silver, glitter star so that when the learner encounters that in the calendar, she won't know exactly what's going to happen but when you pull it out of the calendar, you can name it for her. "Oh, the wildcard. Pictures today." Or, "Wildcard. Woohoo! Special Olympics today." When you pull it out, you don't name wildcard [laughter]. But you use that same representation as a wildcard or a surprise card. For families, this might be a birthday party. Unless you have a super huge family, you're not going to have birthday parties too very often. So you don't need a representation for that. Or a summer vacation, you don't need a representation for that. Create a wildcard with some really fun smell that the kid absolutely loves. Glittery, shiny if the child has some vision. Really a fun, one of the child's most preferred textures just to touch and manipulate for the wildcard representation.\
Number eight. If you must, and family lives are complicated and things come up we don't anticipate. Schools, classroom routines have to change. Teachers have to flexible. If after you review a learner's calendar system with her in the morning and you've checked through everything but the principal says, "Mrs. Cody, you need to come down to the office. We're going to have to have you interview this new teacher assistant applicant." So something is going to have to change in that learner's schedule and she's not going to be able to do a particular activity. Whatever the representation for the activity that gets missed, do not have the learner put those into the finished bin - the finished basket. They weren't finished. They just didn't get done. So as you go through them if the teacher - Mrs. Cody - returns to the classroom you're going through from left to right. One is empty, two is empty, four is the representation of the stretching exercises that weren't done because the teacher was called to the office. You touch it, you feel it, you say, "Oh, stretching. We didn't get to do that today." Put it back in the element. Go to the next one, empty. Go to the next one, pull out that representation. But activities that were not completed their representations should not be dropped in the finished box.\
Nine. You want to keep the calendar system in the same physical location in your classroom, in the same physical location in your home. And most importantly, use it. Use it every day, every day, every day. Use it every day, every day, every day. I could type that 100 times. Consistency, repeated practice. That was what will establish these concepts in the learner's mind.\
SLIDE 20\
There are a couple of activities I'll mention to you before we close for today that really provide good reinforcement for a calendar system. One is an experience book. The second one is an interactive home-school journal. So I want to talk with you for just a couple minutes about each of these applications. An experience book, sometimes called a remnant book, but it's about the learner's personal experience. If you, as a classroom teacher, take your class on a field trip to a nature center, you might pick up a feather. If it's in the fall, and the kids were playing in the leaves, and you helped the learner out of her wheelchair, and her classmates buried her in leaves or something, you might pick up some crunchy leaves. Or that they got to ride on a special school bus that had a different kind of lift, you'd pick out something that represents the lift or something. So just pick out a few very important salient representations from the activities in which the learner engaged. If those representations can be linked to some action like getting on the ground and getting buried in leaves, riding up and down on the lift, that's better, because movement and action are more concrete and something to which the learner can relate more readily. Then, you're going to assemble that experience book with the learner just to go through those three or four remnants, those three or four representations of, "Oh, do you remember our field trip to the nature center?" And you read it, and reread it, and reread it, and reread it. Just like use the calendar system, everyday, everyday, everyday. Read the book, we read the book, we read the book. And use, and touch, and feel those representations, and hook them to what the learner did with the class, with the classmates, and peers.\
SLIDE 21\
The last or second application is an interactive homeschool journal. I think lots of times, teachers who work with learners with the blindness or severe support needs, they'll have some kind of a notebook or forms that they'll use to communicate with the parents how much food and what food, or liquid the child had that day. About what the bathroom habits were. What medications were taken or might have been missed. Those serious kinds of things that parents of learners with multiple challenges need to know. But another option is to develop an interactive homeschool journal that can be used with the learner. What I like about this kind of an application is it supports what I call "memory thinking." That's documented at the bottom of the slide. But I like the notion of, "memory thinking," because building memory is critical to building communication skill.\
And you're going to document something that happened at school and send that interactive journal home with those remnants, with those representations. You could send home that remnant book with the representations of the crunchy leaves and the special little auditory device on which you recorded the sound of the lift as it went up and beeped in a different way. That could be part of the interactive journal that then, goes home with the learner. And then, at home, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mom or dad, somebody at home can read that book with the learner at home to know what that learner did at school that day. I think those of us who are parents, first things we say when we see our kids after school, "What'd you do at school today? What'd you learn today?" Well, with this interactive journal of tangible representations, a learner with [inaudible] can tell their family what they did at school today.\
And, similarly, if a family is interested, you could create an interactive element of something you did at home that night. If you all would go out to see a movie, you might put the movie stuff or part of the bag, a greasy, smelly, buttery popcorn container, and whatever else you might do. If the child has a Slurpee, you might have something that is like a smelly sticker with the flavor of the Slurpee. Very interactive. Smell, tactile, and send that back to school so, the next day, the teacher or the teacher assistant could review with the child what went on the night before at home. Supports "memory thinking." And these two applications, both the experience book and the interactive journal, they really are [analogist?] to a calendar system for a singular activity. And it really supports the kind of thinking and practice that a calendar system tries to build. And that's why I suggest these to you as ways to reinforce learning about a calendar system.\
SLIDE 22\
These are the references. The first one is the calendars book, to which I referred when I was talking about expanded calendars for week, month, year. Also there are great resources at the National Consortium on Deaf-Blindness' site, and a lot of the state deaf-blind projects have wonderful newsletter archives in this kind of thing. But one that I used in putting this presentation together for you is from the Nevada Dual Sensory Impairment Project. They have a great resource on object calendars. So if some of my wordiness is as clear as mine, you're welcome to check those out. I appreciate your time and attention. If you have questions about any of these concepts, I'm sure the staff of the Kansas Deaf-Blind Project would be more than happy to help you out. And if they have questions, they can put you in touch with me. Again, thanks for your time. Good luck. Go build a calendar.\
}