In Mrs. Mitchell’s 7th grade reading class, students are reading the book “Rules” by Cynthia Lord, about a boy named David who is autistic and a boy named Jason who has a speech and learning disability.  The two friends use communication boards to have conversations with others.  As part of their classroom activities, Mrs. Mitchell’s students experimented with their own communication boards to converse with a classroom friend.

After the activity, students wrote a reflection discussing how the activity went and how it felt.  Many students noted the frustration of trying to get the correct message across without words.  They also said they didn’t realize how many words they really used to converse and get a message across to someone because they were limited with only pictures.   Similar to the game of ‘telephone’, students enjoyed finding out what their partner thought they were saying since it was sometimes very different.

Thank you to Mrs. Mitchell for the pictures.