Learning to Speak AACtion Plan: Week 3

As we begin the third week of the Learning to Speak AACtion Plan (this links to the original post that explains everything), let’s take a look at what you are already able to do after only 2 weeks! Whether you started this challenge on the “I have no idea where to start” step or were ready for the “challenge me!” step immediately, you’ve learned at least ten new words. You may be thinking that it’s such a small amount in the vast wealth of words in the world and even within your child’s/client’s augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system.

While ten words is not enough of a vocabulary for a comprehensive language system, as you enter the third week, you can already model ways for your child to request, express continuance/recurrence, use negation/reject, ask for help, and begin to combine words. That’s pretty impressive!

This week, let’s add commenting into the functions of communication and some vocabulary that provides some beginning control of items/activities. Of course, remember that you can combine the words you already know from the previous weeks. Here are the week 3 Learning to Speak AACtion Plan words:

Based on the last 2 weeks of surveys, 77% of responders said they are able to complete these lessons in less than 7 minutes, and 86% of you were able to say the Test Yourself sentences at the end of the week independently so it is a small investment of your time each day to actually learn the vocabulary. Special thanks to all of you who are taking the time to complete the surveys! Here are the practice lessons again:

Someone also asked for a text list of the words instead of the color graphic so I’m also sharing this master list with room for you to check off the words you know:

If you are concerned about syntax (grammar) and worried about modeling telegraphic messages to AAC learner, I thought this might be a good time to mention it. If you are just starting out, and this is confusing, don’t worry, if you are modeling, you’re helping the AAC users in your life. If you have been wondering about grammar, here are my thoughts (and some research):

You may notice that in my “Test Yourself” sentences the past couple of weeks, I’ve added verb tense conjugations in parentheses. As students become more advanced in the number of words they’re using and comfortable having open and available (from a visual and fine motor perspective), it makes sense to match the grammar that you’re speaking as closely as possible, even though you’re not modeling every single word that you say.

Thanks to an offline discussion with a mom of an AAC user who is also a speech-language pathologist, I read several articles this morning about grammatical sentences and telegraphic input. I’ll link two of them here and here (this one is specific to AAC). For those of you who don’t feel like reading journal articles, the short version is to verbally model grammatically what you would say to anyone (i.e. “Let’s try to go to the bathroom again.”) but model on the AAC telegraphically and as grammatically correctly as possible (i.e. “go bathroom again”). My guess is that many of you do this naturally.

You can still get your Rafflecopter entries for completing the Week 2 Survey, until 11:59pm EST tonight. For those of you who are just joining, here’s the link to the Rafflecopter giveaway:
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Have an excellent week!