Where do I start when I read a book? The back page. The front page. The authors name. The hand that did the illustrations name?
This is a typical book. You start at the start and finish at the finish. Yet. I am an OT. I don’t want to use it that way. I want to divide up the pieces that someone else is allowing me to use and to share them with a child in a different way. As an OT, I can divide up this book for different goals in a lot of different ways. This was one of those ways:
This book was purchased because it has a sequence of events in it.
I didn’t divide them up. Someone else did.
I did provide a list of instructions for the child. They did an amazing job. The goals that ‘I’ set were achieved.
Are my list of instructions obvious?
Did I have to provide many instructions to help the child achieve my goals? Or did I just choose the right book to put in front of the child in the first place…
How many books are there like this on the shelves of bookstores at this exact point in time? How long does it take you to go look for them? Did you find many? Or did you have to turn open each book and look at EACH page to see what was on it and then make a decision about whether the ENTIRE book was something that was going to be helpful or not. Oh. Yes. Thats planning. But its also knowledge and its also analysis. When others use this exact book, or if I provide a list of books just like these, did they do the analysis? Because they didn’t do that analysis would they miss things? Would they miss an understanding of how many of these there are in the world of books available for purchase at this exact point in time? Would they have an understanding of the book industry because of all of the books that they’ve read and paged through but discarded just like John West disregards the fish that he doesn’t want. The photographs of these examples can be really helpful if you want to copy this exact same activity. Yet. when you divide up the individual that you are supporting, when do you need to use this? What assessment tool tells you exactly when you need to use this? How many do you need to use in one go? How valuable is that knowledge, to be able to divide things up? As a child, what happens if I don’t give you step by step instructions? When I just let you rely on the information that is presented in front of you. How did everyone go with online learning – when no one could point to the things on the page at the exact right time to say look here, this is what you were supposed to be doing?
The visual instructions need to change.