Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Done with Did

Last week, I outlined my plans for Pamela's speech therapy program (the association method). I am still in the process of assessing irregular verbs for simple past tense, but I have confirmed that Pamela already knows sixty-five irregular verbs plus five more that she knows orally but misspells. It is only Tuesday, and I can already see that she has also mastered constructing past tense questions that contain did. She has mastered enough irregular past tense verbs to move onto the next step, and I plan to cycle them through speech therapy and good old conversations to learn the ones she does not know.

I am already planning next week, a very pivotal step. For years, prior to starting the association method, Pamela always got her present progressive tense wrong by saying either "is sleep" or "sleeping" as the verb in a sentence. Next week, we are going to try again and see if the association method will help her finally conquer this glitch in her syntax. Next week, I will teach sentences in present progressive tense in comparison to past tense. The following week will be questions in present progressive tense. It will be a major test of the efficacy of this method for Pamela.

Pamela is doing well in identifying the elements of a story (including coming up with her own title). Today, she easily sequenced seven questions that go with sentences from a story based upon the order in which the answers occurred! She can also correctly match sentence fragments and the harder task, question fragments. A year ago, she could not have matched the following correctly:



Amazing, huh?

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