Boardmaker

I was first introduced to Boardmaker during one of the special education courses I took at Portland State University. Typically, the program is utilized with students who have special needs, although since getting it, I have used it for TONS of different purposes in my classroom for all students.

Basically, the program has a large data base of picture icons to represent different objects, phrases, and activities that children might see, say, or do at school and/or home. Using the program, you can create picture schedules, communication boards, and games galore for students to use. I have also found that in addition to being a great tool for students with disabilities this is also a great tool to use with English Language Learners. 

In the past I have been frustrated with clip art in that it did not depict the image I was looking for. Boardmaker has been fantastic at providing images depicting just what I want. Included in the images are foods, games, school subjects, sports, people, actions, numbers, coins, animals and much much more. I have found it easy to use and very versatile.

Not inexpensive, the program retails for $299 (which will increase to $329 on August 22nd) and that is the least enhanced version. I was fortunate enough to win  prize money through the Kappa Delta Pi Education Honors Society which allowed me to purchase the program.

Some ideas for using the program:

Picture Schedules: Laminate icons that depict different activities a student participates in throughout the day. Place a large strip of velcro on a student's desk and velcro on the backs of each activity card. Place icons in the order in which they will occur and have a small basket or container the icons will be placed in once the activities have been completed. Often children on the Autism Spectrum Disorder are visual learners. Utilizing this type of schedule allows them to know what is coming next. 

Communication Boards: The program includes specially formatted templates for making communication boards. This would be used for students who are non-verbal or have special communication needs. Essentially a board (piece of paper) is created based on a particular topic and the icons included are all related to that topic. The board helps to facilitate communication or conversation about the specific topic. In class my teacher used an example of Thanksgiving. Icons on the board represented different Thanksgiving foods and activities. There were icons for "I like" and "I don't like" as well as transportation icons to indicate how the student might be traveling. We worked in groups where one person could ask questions and the other person had to respond only by pointing to the various icons and phrases. It was really fun to experience how useful the tool could be for someone who is non-verbal and how much I could communicate without talking. Often students will have communication notebooks or binders they carry with them which include boards on various topics.

Making Learning Fun: I made several games using the picture icons from the program. When my students were learning about money, I made game cards with picture icons of food, games, toys, and animals. Under the picture there was a price indicating the cost of the item. I also made another set of cards using coin stamps that had coin amounts matching the amounts on the item cards. Students spread the item cards out in rows so they were all visible. The coin cards were placed in a pile, face down. The kids would turn over one coin card at a time and had to find the item with the same price in order to buy it. 

I also used picture icons as items my students could purchase from my store. I laminated pictures of fun food items such as popcorn, an ice cream cone, pizza, and cotton candy with prices below the picture and placed magnets on the back. I arranged them on my whiteboard and created my "store."  I would have a student choose which snack they would like and all the kids had to figure out whether or not that child could afford the snack given the amount of money represented by the coin cutouts I placed on the board (also laminated with magnets on the back) The kids loved it!

Sentence Frames: I used a lot of picture icons while teaching my English language development group. I frequently use sentence frames with this group in order to facilitate the use of complete sentences. For example when we were using comparison words to compare animals the frame was:

The ________ is ___________ the _________.

         (animal)         bigger than            (animal)

                      smaller than

                         heavier than

                        smarter than

                          faster than

                                    slower than

In order to help the students, I used picture icons of the animals for them to arrange in order to create a sentence that makes sense. They might place a picture of the elephant in the first blank and a bird in the second blank and choose the comparison words bigger than. Then they would read the sentence:

The elephant is bigger than the bird. 

Because reading too many words in English can be challenging, the addition of the pictures helped the students to read the sentences more fluently. 

Job Chart: Finally, this year I set up the classroom job chart using the picture icons. At the beginning of first grade, many students cannot read the jobs that they are assigned to. Rather than checking the chart and knowing what they have to do, they have to ask me to read what it says. Now, there are picture icons and words to label the different jobs. For example, the most coveted job, line leader, now has a picture showing a line of students with an arrow pointing to the first student in line. Underneath the image it says line leader. Now, students can independently check the job chart and do their classroom jobs!

Most often, this program is used by special educators and speech pathologists, but as a general education teacher I have found it very useful for my classroom in many ways. It was particularly helpful with my student who had Autism last year, however really helped to spruce up some activities used with the whole group. 

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