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.
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...]
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.
Simple Start is a series of posts that discuss AAC-related tools and strategies that are rather quick and easy to make or implement. Whether you are brand new to AAC or relatively experienced, we all come to a point where complicated just won’t do. – In our first Simple Start, we’re talking about Picture Card Rings, a type of visual support for language comprehension. The National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorders defines visual supports as any tool presented visually that can help a person function in their day-to-day life. In this case, we’ve narrowed it down to the specific case of using photos of places around a school to help the student better understand words like ‘cafeteria’ and ‘clinic.’ — Most people with AAC needs do not require a communication system that represents language through photographs. This is a very good thing since there is no way to... [Read More...]
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...]
Cohesion is a tough concept for many of our learners who are developing their AAC skills and struggling to build relationships. In this week’s featured video, Joel Shaul, from Autism Teaching Strategies, discusses how to use two metaphors for building cohesive conversations. One is the idea of links in a chain and the other is the girders of a building. Of course, we are big fans of the use of visual supports whenever we talk and teach. — Although the focus here is learners with ASD, we’ve used this and similar strategies many kinds of learners. Hope you enjoy this informative video. – – – –
This week’s video comes from Katie Thomas of the Autism and Tertiary Behavior Supports Project of the Kansas Technical Assistance Network and deals with the who, what, when, where, and why of using visual supports to promote positive behavior. – There are several supporting documents including the PowerPoint handout, and some of the supports they review (e.g., calendar, first/then, wait card). We love the detailed description and the many examples they share. – Click here to view the video. –
This week we have a series of short videos from the Geneva Centre for Autism on strategies to support positive behavior. Enjoy these explanatory videos on Supporting Positive Behaviors During Changes, Change in Routine, and Learning to Wait. –
A young AAC user whom I know shared a story with me recently about feeling left out and struggling to find out why. Although she is smart, has age appropriate receptive language, and good command of her high tech SGD, building and maintaining friendships is a struggle. One of the things we’ll be doing to make changes in that area is to learn more about what makes a good conversation, adding vocabulary to make small talk easier, and practicing that. – Here’s a nice video, from Autism Teaching Strategies, that shows how to use visual supports and music to help learners remember to use some of the conversational continuers. Although Joel Shaul demonstrates this with visual supports that have words and phrases, the strategy works just as well with pictures for pre-literate communicators. – – Enjoy!
Most of our posts are about teaching language, but today we take a little side trip into nonverbal communication. We’ve all worked with folks who have difficulty maintaining appropriate distance and making eye contact, and know how problems in these area can really impede a person’s ability to relate well to others. Our video for this week, from Autism Teaching Strategies, illustrates how to use pictures supports to teach appropriate nonlinguistic conversational behaviors. – Of course, we were drawn to it because of our own experience that using pictures as a reminder is much easier to fade than oral language prompts (e.g., ‘Don’t forget to look at me when you talk;’ ‘Quiet hands’). – What we also love about this video is the teaching strategy: role reversal. In this strategy, the SLP (or teacher/parent) provides a model of both positive and negative examples of the target skill. The learner’s job... [Read More...]