Focus on English Language Learners

young boyLaureate’s Bilingual Software a “Great Addition”
to District’s Curriculum
by Alison Montaña, Assistive Technology Coordinator
Commerce City, Colorado

Last year, our school district purchased the Bilingual Package of Laureate’s Language Activities of Daily Living Series. This series consists of three programs: My House, My School, and My Town. We opted to purchase a network version of the software at a very reasonable price. The network version can accommodate up to 35 users at one time on a district wide server.

Laureate's Language Activities of Daily Living Series has been a great addition to our school district of 600 students. We are located north of Denver, Colorado and approximately one-third of our students are primarily Spanish speakers.

The Language Activities of Daily Living Series has been a valuable tool to provide information for initial assessment, to conduct ongoing assessments, (with specific results as to vocabulary strengths and weaknesses) and to design future intervention. It has allowed our staff to gain specific information on what commonly-used functional vocabulary skills our students have in both English and Spanish in the following areas: home, community, and at school. The software tracks data from each session and can be used to effectively design data-driven instruction. Another popular feature of this software is that it is fully accessible for students with disabilities.

One of our speech language therapists, Kristi Stivers, who works with middle school students, has said, “I love this software and use it every day. We’ve seen a real breakthrough for one of my students at the middle school who has very severe articulation problems and cognitive delays and who speaks and understands primarily Spanish but often mixes languages. When I took baseline data on his use of language, it was very revealing. His vocabulary for home Spanish was much stronger than English, but it was the opposite in the school setting. He is learning so much now and he loves the software. It’s great that all the language in it is very functional and if students don’t know it in either language, they need to be working on gaining it.”

Another speech-language pathologist Barb Leonard, who works primarily at the elementary school level, has used the software very successfully with students who have autism. She said, “Using Laureate software has been very effective in building basic receptive and expressive vocabulary as well as higher level language skills such as functions and features.  Our students are highly motivated by learning on the computer and the software has been a great tool for independent learning.  We also really like that it automatically tracks the data.”

For those students who have special needs and may not be the most effective verbal communicators, Laureate has given us a valuable tool to see what those students understand and to teach them functional vocabulary. Thanks, Laureate!

 Product Information 
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Laureate’s Language Activities of Daily Living Series includes three programs: My House, My Town, and My School. With the Bilingual Edition, you’ll receive all three programs on one CD and you can toggle between English and Spanish. Click here to learn more.
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We also offer a bilingual Spanish/English edition of Laureate’s Early Vocabulary Development Series: First Words, First Words II, and First Verbs. Click here to learn more.



English Language Learners (ELL) Package
If you’re looking for additional programs to help your English Language Learners, try Laureate’s ELL Package. This package includes 18 CDs that will offer extra tutoring in vocabulary, language concepts, and syntax. Both preschool and elementary students will learn English more quickly when they receive the intensive language instruction that these programs provide. Click here to learn more.