Literacy Stuff

I am working with a literacy client and I needed a short story to work from. Unable to find The Diary of a Whimpy Kid online as requested, I found this other great site with such variety in both topic and difficulty level. Have fun with it. The diversity in genre is also really impressive. Enjoy!

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/childrenindex.html

Temple Grandin

As a person with autism, Temple Grandin uses her ability to view the world through pictures in order to design humane livestock handling facilities. She is proud of the benefits that autism has given to her, such as "synthesizing lots of information and making systems out of it," and uses them to be successful. It is of great importance that someone along the way supported her in using her abilities to be successful. It is commendable that Temple is able to easily identify and verbalize her areas of difficulty so as to give others a window into her brain's inner workings.

Why didn't you just say so.

Dear craft diary,
Today I learned 2 things:

1. All you need to illicit a rich, high quality speech sample is a bingo dotter and some Lion King stickers.

2. It's a lot harder to make a kid say the plural of a noun without saying it first than I would have imagined.
me: This is a cow. There are 2 of them. We have 2.....
kid: "um, a cow? we went in circles for a minute before he let out a big sigh, rolled his eyes, and said aaaaaaaaaaaa coooooooooooow! You say it!"

Of course it makes perfect sense that he would want me to say it to clarify, but that would defeat the purpose. Finally I said, "cowS".
kid: "oh, cows" (insert look of irritation that said why didn't you just say so).

first week of grad school

backpack. check.
notebooks. check.
syllabi. check.
$600 for books. check.

summer days of biking and beaching. bye bye.

here we go.