Sunday: Video of the Week – Franz Gets Ready to Read Monday: Strategy of the Month – Helping Beginning Communicators to Expand Their Sentence Length Tuesday: Teach Me Tuesday – LAMP Words for Life Wednesday: Pen Pals to Help Ease the Transition to Middle School by The Watson Institute Thursday: 5 Books Featuring Children Who Use AAC Friday: Fun Father’s Day AAC Activities
Strategy of the Month Thoughts on Teaching Core Vocabulary Teaching Core Vocabulary with Direct Instruction Strategies New Word Teaching: A Look Inside Some PrAACtical Therapy Sessions Core Words, Direct Vocabulary Instruction, & the Beginning Communicator PrAActical Thinking Fun Friday- 5 Tips for Talking About Halloween After it is Over 31 Posts You May Have Missed in October A PrAACtical Literacy Activity for Beginning Communicators Writing Goals for AAC Learners Fun Friday: Holiday Shopping with a Purpose 10 Apps to Gift to An SLP Hockey Lessons Watch it Wednesday: Using Routines to Promote Interactions by the Watson Institute Throwback Thursday: Say This, Not That to Reinforce Vocabulary Learning Fast FAACt Friday: AAC’s 1st Appearance in the Professional Literature How Do You Teach Others to Implement AAC Facilitation Skills? Watch it Wednesday: Time Timers At the Very Beginning: Working with Pre-Intentional Communicators Display Stand for Visual Supports or Books PrAACtical Thoughts on... [Read More...]
A cool idea for using routines to promote interactions by the Watson Institute. Check out the Watson Institute for other great videos at their You Tube Channel: watsoninstitute1917
For the August Strategy of the Month, we have been thinking, writing, & talking about AAC in School. School is where AAC learners spend a large portion of their days. There needs to be multiple opportunities for students to USE and LEARN AAC each day. More than that though, we strive for full participation and interaction for students who use AAC. Students should not have to prove that they can do these things before they have ACCESS to AAC strategies and intervention. Here are some things that can be done to help build AAC participation for both students and educators. Provide ACCESS to AAC devices and visual supports throughout ALL activities in ALL places in school and on school sponsored trips/community based instruction. Provide Aided Language Input when teaching AAC to students. Use a Core Word approach when teaching AAC to students but don’t forget about Fringe Vocabulary. Learn and use partner assisted communication... [Read More...]
Social Stories™ are a research-supported strategy for helping people to better understand situations and concepts by making these events and the expected behavior within the events more explicit. Initially developed by Carol Gray of The Gray Center, they have a specific structure with rules for development. Here’s a quick overview. Direct Link to Video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjlIYYbVIrI Other people have developed their own form of social narratives with similar goals but a more flexible structure. If you’re looking for information and ideas for using social stories and narratives, take a look at some of the resources below. First, let’s take care of an important question that should be on the mind of anyone thinking about using social narratives. Where’s the evidence regarding the effectiveness of this strategy? Lucky for us, much of it has been collected at the National Professional Development Center on ASD. Here in our own state, the Florida Diagnostic... [Read More...]
Spring break brings a lot of change in routine, unstructured time, & different expectations for most families and clinicians. The changes usually happen even before the break begins because everyone is getting ready (in school, clinics, & at home). When you add daylight savings time, holidays, field trips, travel, family gatherings, and more there is potential for lots of learning of language as well as possible challenges. At this time, it is often helpful to use AAC & visual support strategies for supporting meaningful language experiences and preventing disorganization and meltdowns. We love going through the Watson Institute You-Tube video channel (thank you, thank you , thank you Watson Institute) and looking for demonstrations of visual strategies that are effective for helping learners visually organize and communicate all kinds of information. We use the videos for training and education of clinicians and families. The list of videos is also a... [Read More...]
It was more than 20 years ago when the idea of a Florida Statewide Autism Resource Center was formed. This weekend marked the 20th Anniversary Celebration Conference of that unique and progressive vision. The Center for Autism & Related Disabilities (CARD) was created and flourishes through the collaboration of so many dedicated and energetic parents and professionals. Today, CARD is known as ‘Florida’s First Choice for Autism Support’. What is CARD? CARD is a comprehensive outreach and support program serving people with autism and related disabilities, their families, and the professionals who work with them. CARD seeks to provide support and assistance with the goal of optimizing the potential of people with autism, dual sensory impairment, and related disabilities. CARD is a Florida State Grant Program that provides all services at NO COST to the people who use them. The CARD Conference This years CARD conference was at the beautiful... [Read More...]
We were looking for some specific resources for a distant colleague. We wanted to get as much good information as possible because this colleague was not in our field but in another department that has direct impact over work. We do not necessarily see ‘eye to eye’ on many issues so we thought it might be helpful to our working relationship. In the process, a young man and his family would get some much-needed support. In our exploration, we found some great new videos about schedules- our topic of the month. We found several very prAACtical videos by the Watson Institute about mini schedules. We have found mini schedules to be very helpful for activities of daily living, community activities, leisure time activities and even in special event activities. We love that the Watson Institute put these on you -tube for everyone to learn from. They even have a you-tube video... [Read More...]