Carsten on Capitol Hill?!

Carsten is well into his first semester at Kings Park Elementary school in the preschool special needs program. We LOVE Mrs. Melissa his teacher and his class is full of boys, Carsten loves older boys. Carsten rides the bus to and from and goes Tuesday through Friday from 12-4. The teachers realized early on how much Carsten could understand and demonstrated a large sign vocabulary when prompted but his classmates struggled to communicate since sign language isn't universal. So they wanted to try something else with him and suggested an application on the iPad called proloquo2go. Within the first day of using this application at school Carsten was using 4 word sentences to express his needs and wants. He was able to tell the teachers what he wanted to play with, what he wanted to eat, (yes eat, that is another post!) and talk to his friends through proloquo. Well word kind of got around how he was thriving with it and other teachers began asking about Carsten and how they could get iPads for their classrooms. Mrs. Melissa's husband happens to work in Congress as a graphic designer. So she began taking videos of Carsten using the proloquo2go and put together a small paper on him and research articles to support proloquo2go. Her husband then created a finished video of Carsten using it in different settings and the whole thing has been submitted to Congressman Connelly of Virginia. They are using Carsten's success to petition for iPad distribution in the Virginia school systems. It is pretty neat how the whole thing happened and Chad and I are excited to see if it will be presented in Congress. Mrs. Melissa is keeping us updated so we can go to the open session if they play Carstens video. I will try to put a copy of the video here on the blog, and I will keep you updated on what happens. Either way, we are so proud of him and are blown away by the school systems and Mrs Melissa his wonderful teacher, they really not only see his potential but try to help him reach it as well. Go Carsten!!