VIDBE-Q Volume 68 Issue 4
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student's team. This tool is a formal way to ensure the team can incorporate
communication and literacy into all aspects of the student's life.
Experience Books
Exactly how are literacy skills taught and incorporated into instruction for
our students with extremely complex needs? The CMIM provides a link to the All
Children Can Read: Literacy Skills Checklist created for use with the Literacy for
Children with Combined Vision and Hearing Loss website. This resource can be
found within the National Center on Deaf-Blindness website (National Center on
Deaf-Blindness, 2012).
This resource outlines the incremental steps to Building a Foundation to
literacy, Early Emerging Literacy, Emergent Literacy, and Expanding Literacy
instruction to include writing, vocabulary development, comprehension, and
increasing fluency. The information within this source is directly related to the
CMIM strategies and supports. Additional resources for literacy are also provided
on the WVDE CMIM website (WVDE, 2022).
Experience books can be used for a wide variety of reasons. They are forms
of literacy exposure for students with traditional literacy involvement. The
example below is of a tactile experience book that was made for a student after
being away from school during the pandemic (See Figure 3). He became unable to
tolerate riding on a bus to participate in class community based instructional trips.
