This is a belated post about the 2014 Big Mouth Literacy Camp - but I headed off to the ISAAC Conference straight after camp and didn't get a chance to write this until today.
Big Mouth Camp was a different event this year as it had a literacy AND AAC theme for the first time. 25 AAC users and 20 adults attended the camp, which was held at Glenallen School in Melbourne over the July school holidays.
The whole group
The theme was "Prank Patrol" and lots of writing instructions on how to do pranks and writing about pranks after the event took place! Overall, the camp had two purposes - one was for the adults attending camp to learn more about literacy and literacy assessment. All of the adults who attended camp had also attended an AGOSCI Winter Literacy Intensive at some stage over the last 6 years and have been implementing balanced literacy instruction with people who use AAC. Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver ran afternoon sessions each day (and all day Sunday) for the adults to learn more about literacy assessment with people who use AAC. Each morning, participants were able to implement the skills they had learned in their groups. Which leads me straight to the second purpose - which was for the students attending to learn more about their literacy learning and skills. Each student participated in a literacy group, literacy assessment and did lots of writing and reading each morning. An example of some writing by one of the groups is below!
The camp was run over the July school holidays in conjunction with AGOSCI. It was auspiced by the Cerebral Palsy Education Centre - to whom we owe lots of thanks for all they do. Big Mouth Camp was also funded by our very generous long term supporters Melbourne Welsh Church. Glenallen School kindly provided us with access to their premises for camp - thank-you so much! And a big thanks to everyone who came along and made this another very special event - and to Karen and Dave for taking time out of their US summer to come along to our winter and teach us all to be better literacy teachers and learners.
