The Little Things

Last night I was thinking about a jewel of a book we used with Reagan when she was younger and beginning formal pencil and paper activities. As you may recall, children with Down syndrome (Ds) learn little incidentally. They do not learn as much through observation and indirect exposure as typically developing children.

Skills need to be directly taught to children with Ds. When our children get a new toy, we often have to teach them how to play with said toy. Step by step, we teach them how to enjoy it or learn from it.

When teaching concepts through the well-known method of match-select-name in teaching reading we have to teach our children what match means. When following directions on a work sheet, we specifically need to teach them directions like draw a line to ______ or circle the ______ or cross out the _____.

These are skills we must teach specifically to our children with Ds. They often won’t immediately adopt these skills. We must give them practice at skills that are often left unspoken and not specifically taught. We must be as intentional about the little things as we are the more important skills. For it is in building on the little skills, we find the big picture.

Developing these skills takes only a few minutes a day. You could certainly make your own worksheets to teach the skills. We had a very helpful guide:




Follow Me! Listen and Do Activities by Grace W. Frank, was very helpful in teaching skills needed to follow simple directions on paper. Ms. Frank defines and teaches basic direction terms (line on, line next to, line through etc.), position/location words (top, bottom, beside etc), association (matching, same/different, categories etc.), exclusion (not), sequence (before, after, first, last etc.), word meanings (equal, more, most, fewest etc.) and listening (beginning sounds, rhyming etc.)

Follow Me! Listen and Do Activities is for K-3rd grade. We used it for a very long time. The directions are very simple as are the worksheets. As we moved through the book the directions became more complex. It is spiral bound so that making copies of the worksheets for repeated practice is quite easy. Reagan thought the activities were interesting and fun. They worked and improved her auditory processing skills as she followed simple to more complex directions and gained many new skills often picked up quite easily by typically developing children.

I almost hate to mention this book because it is out of print but can be found for a fairly reasonable price on ebay - reasonable compared to $160.00 and up from Amazon booksellers. Sometimes I wonder how much my homeschooling library must be worth. I’ve been doing this so long that many of my books are out of print!

You certainly don’t need a guide to teach your children these skills and definitely not one which has that kind of price tag. We do need to think about and intentionally teach the little things to ensure our children can learn, step by step - building on what they know, the big things!