Tag Archive: AACtual therapy

AAC Posts from PrAACtical Week # 21 – May 2019

May 26, 2019 by - Leave your thoughts

AAC Posts from PrAACtical Week # 21 - May 2019

Hope you had a wonderful week, AAC friends. Here are some posts you may have missed. Monday – PrAACtically June: More AAC Resources for A Year of Core Vocabulary Tuesday – AAC Link Up Wednesday – Video of the Week: Is AAC the Right Choice for Adults with Developmental Disabilities? Thursday – AACtual Therapy: AAC, Literacy and Squishy Books Before you go, we’ve got a few more topics that may be of interest. Building Sentence Length Through Conversational Routines and Games Be More with Core Helping Learners Build Self-regulation Skills Helping Students with Autism Prepare for Non-routine Events It’s PrAACtically Memorial Day! Join the fun! More info here.

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AACtual Therapy – Homemade Ice Cream in a Bag with Dr. Jill Senner and Matthew Baud

June 2, 2015 by - 1 Comment

AACtual Therapy – Homemade Ice Cream in a Bag with Dr. Jill Senner and Matthew Baud

Jill Senner and Matthew Baud are back to share some of their favorite therapy activities. In this post, they discuss how they build language while making ice cream. Summer is almost here and we’re already thinking about making our favorite frozen treat, ice cream in a bag.  No special equipment is required.  With a couple of plastic zipper bags and 5 ingredients already in your kitchen, kids can shake milk into ice cream in just 5 minutes.  Free picture recipes can be downloaded here.    As with many of the cooking activities we love, there are lots of natural opportunities for language use before, during and after cooking. Before cooking we read the recipe and check the kitchen to see if we have the ingredients.  If any are missing, we write shopping lists of ingredients we need.  We can take a community field trip to the grocery store where there... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy: Fun and Functional in the Kitchen

December 11, 2014 by - Leave your thoughts

AACtual Therapy: Fun and Functional in the Kitchen

Today we welcome back SLP Shareka Bentham to share her prAACtical adventures in the kitchen. You can see her previous posts here. For the past few months I have been having lots of fun using functional ways to teach my little ones vocabulary for items around the house. “Around the kitchen” is a favourite theme, since we always get to explore the kitchen, and make some yummy treats.  I’ve found in my sessions that many children can recognize many of the items in the kitchen, and are aware of their function, but don’t actually know the names of these objects. It has been my goal then for children to be able to label at least 15 items within the kitchen. Vocab items range from the fridge, stove, blender, to food items, spoons, dish towel. Through these activities we have also highlighted the need to be able to talk about many... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy: On Motivation and AAC with Samantha Weatherford

May 8, 2014 by - 1 Comment

AACtual Therapy: On Motivation and AAC with Samantha Weatherford

Motivating clients to use and learn more about their AAC systems can sometimes be a challenge, particularly if the learner has had decades of life experience before being introduced to AAC. In this post, we welcome SLP Samantha Weatherford, who works in the areas of early intervention and adult rehabilitation.  She blogs at So To Speak regarding the educational, professional, and clinical processes of becoming an SLP. She resides in Delaware with her cat Simon, and took some time to share her thoughts about helping adult clients get motivated to use AAC. On Motivation and AAC Have you ever started the AAC training and trialing process with an adult client and realized, “This person is just not interested in being here or doing this?” Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like this happens quite often. I would never rule-out the possibility for AAC eligibility as a result of an... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy: From PECS to iPad with Jason Butcher

April 17, 2014 by - 2 Comments

AACtual Therapy: From PECS to iPad with Jason Butcher

We are pleased to share a guest post by SLP Jason Butcher, who serves students at Grant County Middle School. Jason has been working with middle and high school students for the past 14 years.  He earned his Master’s in Communication Disorders from the University of Kentucky in 1999.  He admits that he came to do AAC more out of necessity than interest due to serving a huge variety and degree of speech/language impairments on his caseload.  He has always enjoyed working with technology and is patient when fixing problems, qualities that he thinks have served him well when hitting the inevitable roadblocks that come with working in the area of AAC. In this post, Jason shares some candid thoughts on the transition from PECS to an iPad for a student with whom he works. It was nearing the end of September when I began to fear that Ms. Ruff, a teacher... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy with Deanna Wagner: Why Cook When You Can’t Eat?

March 6, 2014 by - 3 Comments

One of our prAACtical friends loves to think about, talk about, and participate in anything to do with baking. Not all that unusual unless you consider that he has a g-tube and doesn’t eat in the conventional sense. So we were incredibly excited have this guest post by SLP Deanna Wagner, whose prAACtical ideas for teaching AAC using cooking activities appealed to us right away. You can read more about Deanna here. Why Cook When You Can’t Eat? I have been thinking about writing this post for a number of weeks, now.  And have come up with many different answers to this question,  “Why cook when you can’t eat?” I finally decided I should just talk about how we use cooking activities to reinforce communication skills and let the reader can come up with his/her own answer to this question. Whether I am working in a school classroom or with adults... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy: Use Your Best Spud to Teach Vocabulary With Tanna Neufeld

June 20, 2013 by - 2 Comments

AACtual Therapy: Use Your Best Spud for Teaching Vocabulary With Tanna Neufeld

AACtual Therapist Tanna Neufeld comes through again, putting a prAACtical touch on an activity we all know and love. Tanna has generously shared both her ideas and the communication boards that she uses for this activity. You can download them in our eToolBox or go to the links at the end of this post. Tanna has great intervention tips (love her 80/20 idea!) that are prAACtical and effective for keeping kids engaged and learning. Mr. Potato Head is one of my favorite therapy tools for working with all kids, but especially beginning communicators.  This awesome spud is not only a versatile toy-ripe for building, pretending, and interacting-but also a great tool for modeling vocabulary.  For those little ones that you can keep engaged beyond the putting in and out of the building stage (tap into that good old fashioned, therapeutic use of self!), this toy really goes the distance. I... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy: Go Fish with AAC and Shareka Bentham

June 6, 2013 by - 1 Comment

AACtual Therapy: Go Fish with AAC and Shareka Bentham

We are happy to welcome Shareka Bentham back to our site with more AAC intervention ideas. Earlier in the year, she shared ideas for AAC intervention on a field trip to the zoo, playing Stop and Go, in therapy groups, and doing the Harlem Shake. In this post, Shareka uses a fun card game, Go Fish, to build vocabulary and help students learn to ask and answer questions. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: I have been working more frequently with a few more low tech devices recently, particularly with my older kids at school. We have started using the Go Talk 4+ and the Quick Talker 12 in class, (depending on the child’s level and ability) and have been seeing excellent results. One of my greatest challenges however has been finding ways to incorporate general vocabulary learning into AAC use, while keeping these older children engaged. These are the kids who are 7 years... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy: Harlem Shake, AAC Style with Shareka Bentham

April 18, 2013 by - 1 Comment

AACtual Therapy: Harlem Shake, AAC Style with Shareka Bentham

We’re back again with another AACtual Therapy post from SLP Shareka Bentham. We love the way she creates ‘buy in’ with kids, families, and teachers with this terrific activity. Everyone who knows me knows that I can get a little bit crazy sometimes, so when I went around school informing the teachers that we were going to be doing a school-wide Harlem Shake, no one was surprised. The thing is, my little ones, especially the school aged children are all very aware of the latest trends in popular culture (I have a little one that will only use his Big Mack to request Adele). Whether they are verbal or nonverbal, they can show you all the latest moves. So we just had to do Harlem shake. Well, a modified version… The main focus of the activity was making using AAC to make choices for the dress-up part of the activity.... [Read More...]

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AACtual Therapy: AAC Learning with Play Dough by Jamie Cooley

April 11, 2013 by - Leave your thoughts

AACtual Therapy: AAC Learning with Play Dough by Jamie Cooley

Today, we’re happy to introduce you to another AACtual Therapist, Jamie Cooley, the SLP for Belpre City Schools (belpre.k12.oh.us), located in Belpre, OH. She is a graduate of Ohio University (B.S. ’09, M.A. ’11) and currently resides in Athens, OH. Jamie did work at Ohio University focusing on AAC and children with autism under the instruction of Dr. John McCarthy and Dr. Joann Benigno. She has worked for Belpre City Schools for two years with students in grades K-12. In this post, Jamie uses a case study approach to share a lesson using Play Dough.    Background Emma is a third grade student. She was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, and her cognitive and communication skills are significantly below age-norms.  She receives most of her academic instruction in a resource room. Communicatively, Emma repeats many words and phrases, and combines up to two words on her own. This is... [Read More...]

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