Tag Archive: intervention

Strategy of the Month: Meaningful Communication Opportunities

April 7, 2012 by - 1 Comment

Strategy of the Month: Meaningful Communication Opportunities

April is springtime where we live and spring is a time of beginnings. It’s fitting, then, that our AAC strategy of the month speaks to the very beginning of AAC intervention. Learning how to create focused opportunities to teach or practice an AAC skill is a pivotal skill for SLPs. The concept is a simple one: create an environment in which the learner WANTS or NEEDS to display the target skill. – Communication opportunities are related to the concept of communicative temptations. As SLP blogger Becca Jarzynski  of Child Talk puts it “Communication temptations are pretty much just what they sound like: we set up the environment to tempt children to communicate with us.” Stop by and read her excellent post here . While Becca focuses on their use with young children, the approach can be used with people of any age. – Tempting people to communicate is all about... [Read More...]

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Ideas for Teaching the Use of Visual Schedules

March 24, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

Ideas for Teaching the Use of Visual Schedules

There’s nothing more depressing to us than walking into a classroom in the spring and seeing pristine visual schedules. Why? Because it probably means that the students aren’t really using them. We cheer when we see schedules that are rumpled and dog-eared, not shiny. Show me a battered and tattered visual schedule, and I’ll show you one that gets used every day. Sadly, that’s not always the case. – The bridge between having a visual schedule and consistently using it is one that many learners don’t seem to cross. Here are some of our ideas for helping your AAC learners to the other side. – 1. Have a plan to teach the schedule. If you are working one-on-one with a learner, you can easily implement the schedule and get them using it with most-to-least prompting. If you’re working with a group or a classroom, consider staggered implementation. Teaching 12 beginners... [Read More...]

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Strategy of the Month: Types of Visual Schedules

March 17, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

Strategy of the Month: Types of Visual Schedules

When people think about visual schedules, they tend to think about a classroom schedule with PCS for each major activity of  the day. These are great and we look for them whenever we do classroom visits. In this post, we hope to inspire some of you to use other types of visual schedules as well. We haven’t quite worked out the right terms for these (and we welcome your suggestions) but, conceptually we know that there are three main levels of visual schedules. Each level conveys information about what is happening in a specific segment of time. – At the Calendar Level, the schedule represents what’s happening throughout the month and/or week. – At the Schedule Level, we’re representing the events of a particular day, a portion of a day, or a session (or class period). – At the Task Level, the schedule reflects discrete steps of an activity or... [Read More...]

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HijAACked! AAC & Anti-Bullying with Stand Tall, Mary Lou Melon!

March 14, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

HijAACked! AAC & Anti-Bullying with Stand Tall, Mary Lou Melon!

Stand Tall, Mary Lou Melon by Patty Lovell is a fun book that we like reading online* with kids who use AAC. Many schools have anti-bullying campaigns and read this book and others as part of their efforts to help children recognize and respond appropriately to unkind words and deeds. There are a lot of great resources for reading this book on sites like this one intended for use in general education classrooms. We decided it was time to HijAACk Mary Lou and share some ideas for using this wonderful story to build AAC and language skills. – 1. Beginning communicators could certainly contribute to the ‘read aloud’ portion of the activity with repeated lines, like “So she did.” Recording that into a single message device, an SGD, or an AAC app gives our student a terrific way to be actively engaged. 2. Students who can discriminate between two options can... [Read More...]

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5 Great Resources for Helping Individuals with Vision and Hearing Loss

March 7, 2012 by - 2 Comments

5 Great Resources for Helping Individuals with Vision and Hearing Loss

1. National Technical Assistance Consortium for Children and Young Adults Who Are Deaf-Blind: Communication Fact Sheets. – 2. Early Interactions with Children Who are Deafblind by Deborah Gleason – 3. Learning to Communicate: Strategies for Developing Communication with Infants Whose Multiple Disabilities Include Visual Impairment and Hearing Loss by Dr. Deborah Chen, California State University, Northridge – 4. Communicating and Connecting with Learners Who Are Deafblind – Developing Communication Portfolios (Books and Videos) by New England Center Match Maker Project – 5. Tangible Symbol Systems: Making the Right to Communicate a Reality for Individuals with Severe Disabilities by Dr. Charity Rowland and Philip Schweigert –

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AACtual Progress: Learning to Use Aided Language Input

February 25, 2012 by - 2 Comments

AACtual Progress: Learning to Use Aided Language Input

The only thing better than watching someone who uses AAC get the hang of it, is having the privilege of seeing this develop in future SLPs. Turn up the music, it’s time for the Happy Dance! I had the distinct pleasure this week of watching some of our graduate student clinicians ‘get it’ with respect to using the Strategy of the Month, Aided Language Input. It’s taken a few weeks, but then again they only see their AAC friends for a short amount of time. – Here are a few things we learned along the way. – 1. It takes time to get good at this. We’re speaking pidgin AAC until we get fluent, so just keep at it. Give yourself permission to be halting at first. Keep at it and the fluency will come. 2. It helps to start small. If the communication aid, SGD, or app is complex,... [Read More...]

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5 Little Things that Make a Big Difference in AAC Intervention

February 23, 2012 by - 2 Comments

5 Little Things that Make a Big Difference in AAC Intervention

“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” Betty Reese – Little things can make or break a good streak of AAC implementation. Here are some things that we’ve come to appreciate. They’re small in size, expense, or time demands but pay off in a big way. – 1. Wait time: There’s nothing like a 10-second expectant pause and controlled access to help someone learn to respond without more intrusive prompts. – 2. Clear plastic jars with screw-on lids (nothing beats these for limiting access so that kids are tempted to make a request) – 3. Button covers for the iPad, like these from BubCap. Amazing how a tiny piece of plastic can keep an activity or conversation from derailing. – 4. Bragging (authentically) about a colleague. “Ms. Mama, I have to tell you how awesome Polly Para was... [Read More...]

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HijAACked! Putting An AAC Twist on Gen Ed AACtivities: The Hallelujah Flight

February 19, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

HijAACked! Putting An AAC Twist on Gen Ed AACtivities: The Hallelujah Flight

This is the first in an occasional series of posts in which we take activities designed for students in general education and tweak them a bit to make them into opportunities for AAC teaching. We’ll be building on great ideas from clinicians, parents, and educators (giving credit where it is due, of course). – The first HijAACked activity is from the Classroom Magic blog by Selina Smith.  We chose this one because it gives us a chance to promote one of our favorite online book sources, We Give Books and share a wonderful book that supports Black History Month. We Give Books is a project of the Pearson Foundation and Penguin Books (you can find out more here). The Hallelujah Flight is the story of pilot James Banning and his good friend, mechanic Thomas Allen, flew cross country during the Great Depression. Written by former teacher Phil Bildner, this book... [Read More...]

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Using the AAC Device/App: Getting the Team On Board

February 18, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

Using the AAC Device/App: Getting the Team On Board

Families and professionals often share a common frustration when a new SGD, communication aid, or AAC app is introduced: Getting people to use it. Whether we’re fighting with insurance companies or navigating the educational maze, our attention is often consumed by getting access to the device. Then, oh happy day, it arrives.  Round 1 is over. We won! We get it set up (no small feat). We start teaching the communicator to use it and everyone shares the excitement of this new tool. For awhile, anyway. – And then, reality sets in. – We realize that learning to communicate through this tool and building language skills with it is a p-r-o-c-e-s-s. There’s an arc to that process. It slowly sinks in that this new tool is necessary but not sufficient for real communication and language learning to occur. Though we knew that having the AAC device or app wasn’t going... [Read More...]

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Magic Moments: AAC Intervention with Stop and Go App

February 17, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

Magic Moments: AAC Intervention with Stop and Go app

We’re always looking for engaging ways to give our preschool children practice with their core word vocabulary. Stop and Go by ShortStack is an app that will get your little friends using core language without even realizing how much practice they are getting. — We love the simple structure of the app, which shows vehicles stopped at a traffic light. We see and hear the name of the vehicle and then press the green light for the vehicle to go. It has an English or a Spanish option and lots of interactive elements to try and then talk about. — Magic Moments with Stop and Go 1. Core Word Practice: As expected, there are tons of opportunities for the child to move the vehicles in this app. Using the strategy of controlled access, we can elicit ‘stop’ and ‘go’ multiple times in this game. 2. More Core Word Practice –... [Read More...]

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