This third installment of preparing a student with intellectual disabilities for college illustrates ways of implementing assumptions as lessons. A growing number of exercises that give priority to one or more of these assumptions exist for use with mobile PCs as well as uncounted many bound workbooks appear in commercial venues on and off of the Internet.

If you have a Tablet PC, UMPC, MID, or another mobile PC, consider using it with your college bound young learner. Ink appears to provide openings for more fun and rapid learning than most paper and pencil exercises. And, please let mobile PC software and hardware developers know what works for your learner and what changes you would like to see in developers' products. By offering your feedback so developers may make adjustments in their products, you will assist other learners to achieve more than without your evaluations.

Implement Assumption 1: Count. When teaching, count something related to the lesson. For example, if you want your student to color inside the lines, count the number of objects colored without going outside of lines.

Write down these frequencies, so you can compare the process as well as the results of lessons, sessions, days, etc. Teachers count number of pieces of paper used, problems solved, words repeated correctly, etc. Use these terms to identify other artifacts of lessons to count, and how others record them: trial blocks, precision teaching logs.

Implement Assumption 2: Behavior patterns. Use this assumption by considering each action of your student as consisting of three parts: something happening immediately before what you see or hear, the activity you observe, and something that happens immediately after the activity. She will tell you what prompts before, during, and after that she will use to complete the task.

For example, if she draws what you think are too many marks beyond circle lines, make bigger circles or different shaped or size crayons or different texture paper until she has enough physical control to make smaller lines. Consider every task to consist of these same generic three parts of a behavior pattern.

Lessons to learn to identify and use patterns (use these basic lessons as prompts/reminders whenever her learning rate slows in a more complex task):

Hear-say patterns: sing songs together; play keyboard, kazoo, or some other in unison; repeat TV commercials together; tap patterns with fingers, sticks; ...

See-do patterns: dance together; complete connect the dots, find the hidden pictures, and other such visual puzzles together; ...

Implement Assumption 3: Learn anything. Instruct as though everyone can learn anything, given enough time. Instructors can manage the content of time by breaking an activity into smaller parts that the learner can do successfully. Use smallest steps needed to increase performing as you want for her.

For example, use a Dr. Seuss story book Green Eggs and Ham consisting of one syllable words before introducing multiple syllable words. Use sight-say approach to reading this story. Read it to her at first underlining each word with your finger. Then, hold her finger under each word as you say it; ask her to say it with you after you say it through. Copy a word a day from the book on another piece of paper; tell her what the word is, have her repeat the word, find the word in the book, return to the word on the paper; add words to form a word list; after enough words exist, have her arrange the words to match the book page, etc.

That's a start, pedantic, but open to editing and use. I'll address other assumptions later, then on to lessons.

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