Tag Archive: visual supports

Helping People with AAC Needs Develop Personal Narratives

March 30, 2013 by - Leave your thoughts

Helping People with AAC Needs Develop Personal Narratives

Where I come from, we value our independence. We look forward to the day when we can move out of our childhood homes into our first apartments. We’re intensely proud of our kids when they first do things on their own. We feel honored do to our first professional presentations or fly solo on a publication. We are driven to be independent in our professional and personal lives. Independence is all well and good, but sometimes we get caught up in thinking that it’s the most important thing for our clients who use AAC. Many times, it’s not. As SLPs well know, communication is a social act. Without the cooperation of another person, there is no communication.We need other people in order to communicate and we need them even more when we’re just learning.  Independence is something, but it isn’t everything. For AAC learners, interdependence plays an important role. We love... [Read More...]

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PrAACtical Passover & Easter Visual Supports

March 25, 2013 by - Leave your thoughts

l Passover & Easter Visual Supports

Happy Passover & Easter to those who celebrate!   There are some great free visual supports to help ALL children participate in the holiday routines.  We are thankful to Gateways Access to Jewish Educationand Positively Autism– Daily Autism Freebie for making these readily available.  Whether you use them for your students, clients, family, or guests, we hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and everyone is included.   Passover  The Seder Order, The Ten Plagues, Passover Social Stories, Passover Prayers, Passover Songs, Passover File Folder Activities Easter  Going to Church on Easter Travis the Train Goes on an Easter Egg Hunt Decorating Easter Eggs Going on an Easter Egg Hunt Easter Vocabulary Easter Songs (scroll to the bottom of the page for the videos)  

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Video of the Week: The Importance of Using Visual Supports

February 24, 2013 by - 1 Comment

Video of the Week: The Importance of Using Visual Supports

We’re always looking for great materials to share with colleagues and parents about topics related to AAC. This video by OCALI (the Ohio Center for Autism and Low Incidence)  has been one of our favorites. It gives a brief overview of why visual supports are so important in the educational and clinical services provided to individual with ASD and other developmental disabilities.

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Inclusion & Jewish Disability Month

February 19, 2013 by - Leave your thoughts

Inclusion & Jewish Disability Awareness Month

February 2013 is the 5th annual Jewish Disability Awareness Month.  In honor of inclusion into a Jewish education and life we wanted to share some resources that will help support full participation for everyone.  Keep in mind though,  the idea of inclusion transcends a specific religion and all of the resources here can customized and used to welcome ALL families. A Virtual Book Club Webinar:   Now I See The Moon- A Mother, A Son, A Miracle    **Definitely Worth Watching (great story and learn how inclusive programming was created where there was none)** Jewish Disability Awareness Facebook Page Gateway Access to Jewish Education Visual Supports for Passover, Shabbat, High Holidays, Chanukah, & Purim. Jewish Disability Awareness Month Guide Children’s Book’s About Disability  

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Visual Organization, Themes, & Duct Tape.

January 3, 2013 by - Leave your thoughts

Visual Organization, Themes, & Duct Tape

Duct tape just keeps getting better.  For full transparency and disclosure, we get nothing and  receive nothing from the makers or licenses of any brand of duct tape.  We only buy it (although sometimes it might be on sale).  We have written about duct tape as a prAACtical behavior strategy, but since that time, the popularity of duct tape as a crafting tool has increased.  We are  excited not because of the crafting opportunities but instead because we see many more patterns of duct tape in the stores.   Any plain duct tape will work as a visual organization tool, but we love that we can add a thematic component to our organization system. Keep in mind, the main point of using duct tape is as a visual organization support.  It helps ‘set the stage’ for goal focused interaction and meaningful language experiences.  It visually shows expectations. We want learners to... [Read More...]

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Talk About Me 2

December 13, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

We write about a lot of AAC strategies and we often give examples of different types of learners. Sometimes the learners we work with have more challenges than we explain. Lest you think, we do not see the really ‘challenging’ learners, we do, we really do.  For those individuals with more challenges than most, sometime we are asked, well what do a few visual supports or AAC strategies do? What difference do they make? The truthful answer is A LOT. Here are a just a few recent examples from some really amazing families. When a mom is on the phone, a young adult brings in a timer and sets it so mom will get off the phone and go sit with her. When a communication book is forgotten on an emergency trip to the dentist, drawing on a napkin is enough to keep everyone calm so that the dentist can... [Read More...]

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It’s PrAActically Chanukkah!

November 29, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

It's PrAACtically Chanukkah! Resources to Get Ready for the Holidays

Chanukkah is prAACtically here, even though it seems very early.  Chanukkah starts at sundown on December 8th and ends at sundown on December 18th.   Holidays are usually fun and busy.  With all the fun comes changes in routines, less sleep, more stress, more excitement, more people, more compromise, and overall different expectations.  This is a time to plan in advance the visual supports, visual systems, and AAC displays that will help everyone understand, organize, and communicate most optimally. Check out these great resources to help with the planning: Friendship Circle Blog- Preparing for Hanukkah,  15 Tips to Make Sure Your Child is Ready for The Holidays, & More Gateways Program Resources- There are  visual supports for the  Chanukkah Blessings. There are social story books that help with understanding that birthday candles and Chanukkah candles are different, that Chanukkah candles go out by themselves, and about Chanukkah candles and fire safety.... [Read More...]

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Simple Start: Visual Supports for Places We Go

November 9, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

Simple Start: Visual Support for Places We Go

No matter where they work, SLPs supporting people who use AAC generally do what they can to improve communication across environments. In an earlier Simple Start post, we talked about using photos of places within a school to support language comprehension. By showing a picture of the cafeteria or gym as we say those words, we can help both students with language processing difficulties and those with behavior regulation issues. — In this post, we extend the same concept to travels in and around the community. Here are directions for making visual supports that can be used with students who have community-based instruction or by families as they go about their weekly errands and routines. Simple Start: Visual Support for Places in the Community Take photo of locations in the community that the AAC user is likely to visit. Insert them into a document and add labels for each one... [Read More...]

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Video of the Week: Helping Hands + Visual Supports

October 21, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

Helping Hands Download

We love this idea from Amy Laurent about Helping Hands, a positive and proactive way for children to get help when they need it. The strategy involves placing a visual support, such as a picture of Helping Hands, around the classroom in places where the student is likely to need assistance. Her Helping Hands video explains it in more detail. We love the proactive nature of this strategy, which aims to prevent frustration, rather than waiting for a problem to occur. We took a stab at creating some visual supports that can be used with the Helping Hands strategy, and you can download it below.

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Beyond Behavior Problems: How Visual Supports Can Help Our AAC Teaching

October 9, 2012 by - Leave your thoughts

Beyond Behavior Problems: How Visual Supports Can Help Your AAC Teaching

Visual supports are not just for people with behavioral challenges. In this post, we share some ideas of using visual schedules and other supports to enhance comprehension and language learning. Let’s look put this into a clinical context. Marvin is a high school student with intellectual disabilities and cerebral palsy who is learning to use a high tech SGD.  He is a personable young man who engages easily and comes to each session with a ‘ready to learn’ mindset. Most of Marvin’s goals revolve on learning to build sentences using core words. Although he has very limited literacy skills, he really, really wants to learn word prediction. This presented a bit of a dilemma, as I typically don’t  begin to teach word prediction until spelling skills are approaching the third grade level. Marvin has some terrific splinter skills but his overall spelling skills are probably around the mid-first grade level.... [Read More...]

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