Magic Moments: AAC Intervention with Apps You Love – Painting with Time

January 15, 2012 by Carole Zangari - Leave your thoughts

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Sean Sweeney, from Speech Techies, always has great ideas for free or low cost apps or web-based materials that have wonderful therapeutic potential. Recently, he posted about Painting with Time, a free app that you can read about here. It’s such a cool app that we decided to use it to launch our Magic Moments series.

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Magic Moments is an occasional series that gives PrAACtical suggestions for therapy materials, apps, software, and websites that are easy for SLPs to access and use in their clinical work. We’ll focus on materials that many of us already own and use, as well as on free or nearly free materials. Sometimes the materials will be electronic, like iPad apps or software. Other times, we’ll go ‘old school’ and bring out some of our favorite therapy materials, like toys, games, photo albums, and more. The focus will be on using those materials to teach language to people with AAC needs. Whenever possible, we’ll try to include suggestions for both beginning and more advanced communicators.So, let’s get this party started!

As Sean’s review said, Painting with Time is the perfect app for teaching temporal concepts, like beginning/middle/end, past tense, sequencing and much more. In addition, here are some AAC-oriented language targets that we can address with this fun app.

Magic Moments: AAC Intervention Using Painting with Time

Core word practice: Playing with this app interactively is a great way to highlight words like I, you, it, is, make, go, and do. “Make it go.” “You do it.” “Can I do it?” “I want to see.”
Practice with specific sentence structures: Building sentences is hard work for kids learning AAC systems. This app would be a great way to give lots of practice with a particular senctence structure. “It is dark.” “It is fun.” “It is quiet.” “It is strange.” “It is lonely.” “It is sleepy.” “It is dirty.” We love repetition with variety!
Recurrence: Some of our AAC friends at the earlier stages of communicative development need to practice asking for ‘more’ or asking for things to be done ‘again.’ By limiting access to the iPad (‘My turn’ + taking it), we can easily provide a dozen or more opportunities for the communicator to request another turn.
Conversational Questions: We see lots of potential for turn-taking with the iDevice and using language to build a conversation around the app. “I see a tree. What do you see?” “I see snow. What do you see?” “I see the sky. What do you see?”
Causality: Lot of our kids need practice with verbal reasoning, particularly when the topic reaches beyond their personal lives. We could have lots of fun giving reasons for why the pictures are changing. “The ice melted because it is warm in May.” “The room is clean because the things got put away”. “The grass is gone because it is cold.”

How about you? What Magic Moments have you had with apps like Painting with Time?