I am currently seeing students who have been in our Autism Classroom moving back into the regular school environment. Typically, these students do well with decoding skills but lack comprehension. I have been researching programs and have found the LindaMood program, "Visualizing & Verbalizing" which works in the following way: "Visualizing & Verbalizing" The Nancibell® Visualizing and Verbalizing for Language Comprehension and Thinking® (V/V®) successfully stimulates concept imagery. Individuals become able to image gestalts which include color, and even movement. This improves their language comprehension, reasoning for critical thinking, and expressive language skills. It is common for individuals to gain years in language comprehension in four weeks of intensive instruction" -taken from the website at http://www.lindamoodbell.com/programs/visualizing-verbalizing.Aspx The complete program cost is $399.99 plus the set of 3 workbooks per child (I would need 8=$264 per grade level) The ordering site is Gander publishing: http://www.ganderpublishing.com/Visualizing-Verbalizing-Workbooks-Grade-3-Set-of-3.html The total cost to implement this program, not only for my newly integrated Autistic children but also for my Intellectually Disabled and Learning Disabled children would be: $940 Here is the breakdown of the supplies I would need: Complete kit: $399.95 8 workbooks for 2nd grade level: $264 8 workbooks for 3rd grade level: $264 2 tracking charts for progress monitoring: $23.90 TOTAL: $940 Please check out these sites and contribute what you can! You will be helping sooo many students! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Second Type of Funding for my SPED students: I would love to use iPads in my classroom with my special needs kiddos! There are many free and low-cost educational applications that would give my students an engaging, hands-on tool to boost their reading, math and writing skills! It would also help with fine motor skills! Our small, rural town has an extremely high poverty rate. Many of my students do not have access to any source of technology at all. I am constantly worried about them being able to function in our high-tech world. The computer lab at school is quite small for our 500 student elementary school, so most of our students have very little computer experience if their family does not own a computer. I have several behavior students and intellectually disabled students who often come into my resource room to decompress from the large classrooms. Being able to give one of these students an iPad and have them use it in close proximity would let me continue to teach the scheduled group, but to also assist students who need to use the resource room at random times during the day. I see many,many benefits to the use of just a few iPads and the educational applications in my special education room!