Speaking of the Weather: 5 AAC-friendly Ideas

It makes a regular appearance at Circle Time and Morning Meetings. It’s part of our casual conversation on a daily basis. We learn about it in Science classes and it often plays a role in the books we read.

Everyone talks about the weather.

How can we take advantage of this ubiquitous topic to strengthen AAC learning? Here are a few ideas of language concepts to address.

1. Core Vocabulary: Weather-related discussions offer many opportunities to model and elicit core words, both by themselves and in the context of longer sentences.
   • Single words: Feel, it, like, look, see, that, what
   • Multi-word combinations: I can see rain/snow/sun. Look at that. What is it like outside? Can you feel it? I don’t like when it is ___.
2. More Advanced Vocabulary: Many AAC users have vocabularies that are smaller than we would expect, even when no cognitive issues are present. Talking about the weather gives us an opportunity to work on additional vocabulary across a variety of word classes.
   • Nouns: Breeze, flood, puddle, storm, sunscreen  
   • Verbs: Blowing, melting, pouring, shining, slipping, watching, wondering 
   • Descriptors: Balmy, chilly, dangerous, frozen, icy, really, very, warm, windy
   • Location-related: Area, far away, inside, nearby, neighborhood, outside, state, region 
   • Temporal: After, before, during, later, now, yesterday
   • Feelings: Worried, excited, surprised, disappointed, relieved, scared
3. Conjunctions: Conjunctions are used to connect words and clauses, and many AAC users need support in expanding their repertoire of this powerful word class.
   • Early-developing: and, because
   • Later-developing: After, although, before, since, whether
4. Sentence-building: In activities like Circle Time where the weather is addressed every time, we have a wonderful opportunity to work on sentence development.
   • Those at the single-word stage can be supported in creating 2-word utterances (e.g., it cold; not like; that good, I see).
   • For those already creating sentences, we can expand them by adding a word or two (e.g., It snowed -> It snowed last night; It is cold -> It is really cold; It looks cold -> It looks cold and rainy).
   • We can also model and elicit more complex sentences for those beyond Brown’s stage 5 (e.g., Since it snowed, I haven’t been able to use the sidewalk outside our apartment. Let’s go outside to measure the rainfall so that we can chart it later). 
5. Narratives: Changes in the weather give us a great opportunity to support narrative development. We can co-create short stories about our weather-related experiences. E.g., Our Snow Day: Yesterday, it snowed a lot. It was too dangerous to drive, so we stayed home. We felt happy and excited to have a Snow Day! Some of us played outside in the snow. We wore coats and boots. Some people stayed inside and had hot chocolate, soup, and chili. It was fun.

How do you support AAC learning during conversations about the weather? We’d love to hear about your experiences.