At the beginning of the school year, I read a post on George Couros’ blog about a little girl named Emily. This post really resonated with me. Emily is a student at George’s school, and she sounds like the most amazing child. George speaks about all of her incredible gifts, and he also speaks about the fact that Emily is autistic. Emily has a service dog that accompanies her to school each day, and this dog helps calm Emily during difficult situations. Until this post, I never heard about having a service dog for autism, but George’s post definitely intrigued me, and Emily and her mom definitely made an impact on me.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet from George about Emily. Her mom, Alison, published a book called If My Dog Could Talk, and it was all about Emily’s day-to-day life with her service dog, Levi. The book looked amazing, and so I ordered a copy. It arrived on Wednesday, and on Thursday, I decided to read it to the class.

Over the year, we have already spoken a lot about autism, and the students can all connect to having a child in the class that is autistic. Maybe it was the photographs in the book, or the rhyming verses on each page, or just the simplicity of the text that instantly had all of my students loving, If My Dog Could Talk. After reading the book, I mentioned that Emily went to Mr. Couros’ school — all of my students know of this principal from Alberta, as he has inspired many classroom activities too — and right away they wanted to connect with her.

We have been working on “point of view” in the classroom, so we looked at some of the different photographs in Alison’s book, and we talked about what the dog might be thinking on each page. The students then chose to draw pictures of an event in the book and add a thought bubble or two, inferring what Levi might be thinking at this time. I mentioned to the students that I follow Alison on Twitter, and so they thought that it would be great if we could make a VoiceThread and share the link with her. We did just that!

This sharing had amazing results. On Friday night, I got these tweets from Alison:

Alison's First Tweets To Me

When I wrote her back and said that she could definitely share these links, I noticed that not only is our VoiceThread on her webpage, but it has also been tweeted out to numerous people from around the world.

All Linked To Our VoiceThread

All Linked To Our VoiceThread

I even got numerous tweets from Nancy, another parent at George Couros’ school, asking about our VoiceThread and saying how much she enjoyed it.

Alison’s book really helped my students understand what autism is all about. Her book educated us, and now we can help educate others too. Thank you, Alison and Emily, for showing us that education really is power!

Aviva