Jane Farrall Consulting

Targeting Onset Rime with Emergent Literacy Learners

Feb 10, 20178 Comments

Phonemic awareness is an important skill – it is what we use to hear sounds in speech. Without phonemic awareness, we cannot break words down and decode them to read unfamiliar words. We also find it extremely hard to re-code words to spell them. Therefore, phonemic awareness is a very important skill in learning to

Word Walls: Using the Word Wall

Feb 1, 201712 Comments

Last month I wrote about getting your word wall ready for use. Now they are ready – we need to use them. There is no point having a word wall that you don’t use! Word Walls are an important resource for conventional readers and writers. Our job, as educators, is to teach them how helpful

Word Walls: Getting the resources ready

Jan 13, 201717 Comments

In the next couple of weeks in Australia and New Zealand, our schools will finish their summer holidays, and students and teachers will return to the classrooms. This means that lots of teachers are currently getting their resources together for the new school year ahead – including me. For students who are conventional readers and

Literacy for All: An introduction to balanced literacy

Nov 13, 20162 Comments

Upcoming Adelaide Workshop 27th of January, 2017 8:30am to 3:30pm Adelaide West Special Education Centre 12 Moldavia Walk Taperoo SA 5017 Workshop Description Including the diverse range of students in special education settings in a literacy program can be extremely challenging. This presentation will outline a balanced literacy approach that can be used with ALL students to actively intervene

Getting Hands-On with PODD thanks to Interactive Speech Pathology

Sep 23, 20168 Comments

This week I have been at the wonderful Joondalup Education Support Centre in Perth, Western Australia. They have a number of students using AAC systems, including a few who have started recently with Pragmatically Organised Dynamic Display (PODD) books. One of my favourite resources to share with people who are beginning to use PODD is

ISAAC Pre-Conference Workshop: What’s Up in Apple Apps?

Aug 7, 20169 Comments

Today was the first day of pre-conference workshops at the ISAAC 2016 Conference in Toronto, Canada. I love the ISAAC Conference – and being a part of the fabulous world AAC Community – so it was a very exciting day for me. First up this morning, I attended a workshop by Carole Zangari from PrAACtical

AAC and my Mum

Jul 23, 201639 Comments

My mother has Alzheimers. She has had it for several years but this year she has deteriorated rapidly. She has developed complex communication needs as this has happened. She struggles to find words and often can’t finish a sentence as she forgets where her sentence is going. She can no longer tell all the funny

Tar Heel Gameplay – accessible video games!

Jun 8, 20164 Comments

I’m very excited to say that there is a new option in the Tar Heel family – Tar Heel Gameplay! Tar Heel Gameplay lets you create a timed switch version of most videos. You can link to a video on YouTube and create a switch, touchscreen, keyboard or mouse accessible version of the video in

Let’s Communicate: Plenary presentation at #QASELcon16

Jun 3, 20164 Comments

This morning I was honoured and delighted to give a plenary presentation at the Queensland Association of Special Education Leaders (QASEL) 2016 conference. The presentation was on Augmentative and Alternative Communication – aimed at dispelling some myths and discussing good practice. I was lucky enough to have students and teachers from Claremont Special School and

Teaching (and Learning) the Alphabet: Playing with Letter Shapes and Sounds

Jan 4, 201624 Comments

It is currently the summer break in Australia and I’ve had a few emails and messages from teachers who are spending time over the break getting ready for the next school year. Several of these emails have been about alphabet activities and resources – so I thought I’d do a post about my ideas as