About This Site

At our house, emerging literacy is more than an academic exercise. We're the Clarke family, and we have our own emerging reader. Our family of six stays busy - and that "busy" includes supporting an adult with a disability.

Our crew includes Dan, a carpenter, and Laura, a special education consultant (and the creator of this site). Our oldest daughter Catherine has a lifetime of supporting Dan and works in urban planning. Dan enjoys spending time at Redwood's Young Adult Program while Elizabeth and Lily are busy in middle and elementary school. Everyone in our family understands the important balance of being a family first, and supporting the communication, AAC, behavior, and daily living needs of a family member with a disability. Our daily goal for AAC: model, model, model!

A young adult now, Dan has been working on developing his AAC and communication skills since he was 2 years old. Throughout the years, we've embraced medical diagnoses including autism and epilepsy and IDEA eligibilities for developmental delay, autism, and intellectual disability. In those years, we continually provided access to and modeling of Picture Communication System (PECS) and AAC on his iPad. Dan has continued to be at an emerging level of proficiency, and our philosophy is "just keep modeling." We fully embrace that there is no magical date for mastery, no date that says Dan is "too old" or "too" anything - he'll communicate with AAC when he is able.

In our family, we LOVE reading . It's a typical day to find everyone curled up in separate corners reading a favorite novel or new book. While the girls and I love reading, we struggled to find an age appropriate option to engage Dan in the same love of reading. While he was in school, we contented ourselves in knowing that his teachers were sharing books. But as he aged out of IDEA services and into the world of adult supports for people with intellectual disabilities, we found that there was still a need to support his emerging literacy skills.

These books were originally developed to support his alphabet awareness, and then adapted so other educators and families can use the books to support their own emerging readers and writers. We wanted to offer options that teachers from preschool through high school could use to provide evidence-based instruction AND personalize books to meet the needs of their own students. We wanted to make them accessible so parents and families like us could also access free resources to use at home.

We hope you find them as useful, engaging, and fun as we have in our home! We'd also love to share more resources, so feel free to add to the fun and send your books to us to share on the website.