The Beginning of Our Spelling to Communicate (S2C) Journey
We first heard of “Spelling to Communicate” on the podcast The Telepathy Tapes. The idea of it was so fascinating, we looked into it a little. We found a lot of videos on YouTube about the subject, including Spellers: The Documentary.
If you have someone with Autism in your life, I highly recommend both of these! I feel like I have a whole different perspective than I had before. I have a sense of hope again, that seems to have been missing for quite a while.😊
We worried about the cost, about how far we might have to drive — if we could even find a spelling facilitator who had an opening, etc. I reached out to International Association for Spelling as Communication ( https://i-asc.org/ ) and they sent me the contact information for Tracy the next day. She and I spoke on the phone for well over an hour, and she is definitely my kind of people.💖 She is about a half hour from us, but she comes to us! All I can say is God had His hand in this entire thing.
Josh’s first Spelling Lesson was last week. It was mind blowing! I could cry again thinking about it. This first pic is when Tracy (the spelling facilitator) had just gotten there, and was explaining what they were going to do. The most important part of S2C is presuming competence.
The second pic is the words he spelled out on the letter boards. Another important thing at first is for Josh to learn the motion of poking the pencil through the letter. Tracy might assist him by pointing or gesturing to the letter, or give verbal cues. This is all to help build confidence!
The lesson works like this: Tracy would read a paragraph — this lesson happens to be about Sherlock Holmes — and ask him questions after. Sometimes she would re-read one of the sentences and have him spell out the last word. It was jaw-dropping, watching him get the hang of it.
He had worked really hard and we figured we were done for the day, so Josh was chillin on his bed with his iPad. Tom came upstairs to see how it was going, so Tracy asked Josh if he wanted to show Dad what he could do. We got him back in a chair and she read: People would hire Sherlock Holmes to help them find “______” and he spelled out “ANSWERS” so quickly and confidently! It had been like 15 minutes since she originally read that sentence in the paragraph. Tom and I were both teary — it was amazing!
Tracy came again a couple days later, and we saw some more mind-boggling spelling from Josh. I didn’t take a pic of the words this time, but the ones I remember him spelling were Deuteronomy, Moriarty, nemesis, and in this pic he was spelling Afghanistan.
