Ellie is a pint-sized genius parrot, and last August I began teaching her how to read. Now she reads a wide variety of small words and even sentences and little emerging reader children's books. Here's a video of her reading a book last week! :)
So. In between all of the millions of hours I'm working on our small business right now, I've been trying to do tests on Ellie. I'm calling them The Ellie Files :D
I've really struggled to find a format that would work with Ellie in a blind-study sense. Here's a video of how I normally do flash cards with my little reading parrot:
We tried putting cards on the wall and had her read words and identify them with objects, but it is long and boring for her, so she didn't love it. She actually did a really, really good job, but not consistently, and it was clearly not going to work for us, long term. There was the added problem that it wasn't blind - I knew what the cards said. Here's a video of that experiment:
We tried having my mom Skype with me and read cards while I actually had a blindfold on my face, and that was an interesting attempt, but my Mom in subsequent sessions couldn't read the cards, and I didn't hold them up properly for Ellie...
SO WE HAVE FOUND A SOLUTION. I taped a few cards together - so that I can't see what I'm holding up. Then I split the vocabulary cards into two at a time - and wrote on a separate card which two were in each stack. I don't know the order, but I know that one is "SIT" and the other is "PET" for instance - so now it's blind, and I can hold them up properly, and she can select them!!! :)
Alas my little creature of habit is satisfied that the game moves quickly, AND IT IS A BLIND STUDY!!!
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