Some ways of using a turtle with students who have severe learning difficulties.

A report by Tina Dethridge & Vanessa Lees, Lakeside School, Herts.

Objective: To find ways the turtle could be used with SLD children (Junior to Senior range) to support language, directionality and number concepts.

Pre-Turtle

1. Maze games -

   Rabbit on Widgit "Pathfinder" Mazes drawn on paper

2. Left and Right. The words "left" and "right" were too hard for the group so we used colour (red & blue). Discuss turning, where to go, which way to turn...
3. Giving direction instructions; Robot game. One child is a robot and the others must give the instructions to go somewhere and eventually to negotiate a simple obstacle course.
4. Plans. Draw a plan of the school and use that representation to give the instructions to go somewhere (to the toilets/reception).
5. Maps. What they are - this was too hard to understand.

Turtle

1. Trundle and Nudge - 4 switches. We are dealing with physically able children, but choose switches to simplify inputs. Put red and blue stickers on the turtle legs and also add green for forward and yellow for backward.. Press a switch to see which way the turtle moves. Put the right colour sticker on the switch.
2. Move turtle around with pendown to see the path. Make crazy patterns, then send turtle from one person to another. Most children could manage this to some extent, although some couldn't cope with turning the turtle around.
3. Make an obstacle course. First one object, then gradually increasing difficulty. Very popular.
4. Give directions to each other in using turtle. (Not a silent activity!.) Discuss which way to go to get from one place to another.
5. Steps. See how far the turtle goes in one press. This is a turtle unit. Lie down and draw round each other and measure how tall they are. Unfortunately as the differences were so slight this was not very useful.
   Draw a base line and take the biggest step possible. Measure this in "turtles". Guess first. Because of the different physical abilities there were very large differences in step size. Small sizes were estimated fairly reasonably, steps over 8 or 9 were totally chaotic. We drew a "graph" (little picture) of the steps, and did them on big paper on the floor with pendown so we could see a record of steps. A very successful event!
6. TIG Starting at TIG 1 with big turn and forward we changed input method to concept keyboard. Sadly the turns were of fixed size but the forward was not, which caused confusion after previous exercises. So we concentrated on turning, identifying turns and using language more purposefully to achieve the goal.
7. Points. Use TIG 1 and place objects/small toys at each compass point. Using the objects as identifiers turn turtle to point to the specified object. One child chooses, another moves the turtle. Discussion on strategies - which is the best way to turn?
8. TIG 2 with big and little turns. Introducing "big" and "little". Some side work on size as well - we could have done more if there had been time.
9. Points again with 8 objects. Estimate how many turns of which size to move between two objects. This was too difficult so we concentrated on little turns. They could now manage this with the big turn left on the overlay. A very popular game and very good. The skill involved in this task improved noticeable between sessions.
10. Steps. We went back to steps at this point to see what, if anything, they remembered. Surprisingly not only did they remember what a turtle length was, how to do it etc. , but their estimation had noticeably improved.
11. Maps. We made a giant map on the floor. Estimate distances between places then find out the real distance. The estimation was very good, even on numbers over 10 (we did not allow over 20).
12. Maps. We reintroduced real maps of the area around the school. One or two could now find their homes on the map and trace the route to school. Almost everybody could at least show which way the taxi or minibus went out of the school entrance.

Observations
The group cooperation and motivating nature of the activities enables a great deal of discussion and incidental language work, turn taking and play strategy. We counted the moves out loud together helping the poor verbalisers. Jenny (a very poor verbaliser) began to be our counter. We discovered that she could count rather well in a parrot fashion and although at the beginning she did not relate the speed of counting to the speed of turtle. Later in the project this became much better. We were able to involve a much wider range of children in this activity than we had originally envisaged and children who rarely participated in such concrete tasks were able to gain from it.

We felt we had all gained a great deal from this project. Every child had achieved a new skill. Although many things were forgotten between sessions, we never had to go back to the beginning. A steady learning was taking place. When the activities were repeated after a time gap they had surprisingly little difficulty in recalling strategies and solutions.