Tag: apraxia
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Learning to Speak AACtion Plan: Week 10
The daffodils always surprise me. Even though I know they are the first flowers in my yard to bloom, I don’t notice that they’re green and growing until I see the first flower. The yellow gets my attention, and spring begins. Every year I wonder how I missed the leaves. It would be exciting to…
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Learning to Speak AACtion Plan: Week 9
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California was once called “the bridge that couldn’t be built.” It took ten years of planning because of the intense opposition and another four years to actually build it. Once…
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Learning to Speak AACtion Plan: Week 8
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” ~Arthur Ashe Welcome to Week 8 of the Learning to Speak AACtion Plan! If you’ve been following along each week and doing all of the practice lessons up to this point, you have learned 35 core vocabulary words in your child’s augmentative and…
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The Day You Raised Your Expectations
Have you heard about the rats? There’s a study that was done where Bob Rosenthal, a researcher, took a group of regular, every day, average rats. The rats were divided randomly into two groups. He put signs labeling one cage of rats as “maze bright” and the other as “maze dull.” Each group, with the signs…
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Learning to Speak AACtion Plan: Week 6
Welcome to Week 6 of the Learning to Speak AACtion Plan! This week, one of my students made organic dog treats to donate to the animal shelter, and he gave me a package to give to my dog. Since today also happens to be Valentine’s Day, I wish you all the kind of joy that my…
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AAC Modeling Part 2: Layers of Modeling Engagement
Yesterday, I wrote about AAC Modeling and compared it to introducing broccoli to a child. I’ve also written about modeling here and here, if you’d like some additional information. If you are at all involved in the world of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), you probably hear a lot about modeling, also called Aided Language Input…
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AAC Modeling Part 1: A Piece of Cake and a Bite of Broccoli
If you are at all familiar with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) implementation, you have likely heard of modeling, also referred to as aided language input and aided language stimulation. In my daily conversations, I get the feeling that dedicated teachers, parents, and therapists often have the misconception that they’re not doing enough for their…
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Speech Segmentation and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
We are often asked about the reason that words are spoken individually in the Speak for Yourself augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app instead of allowing the user to compose their message and then speak the full sentence. The reason it is set up that way is so that the AAC user gets immediate auditory…
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Speak for Yourself AAC App Now Has Multi-User Capability!
Version 2.0 of the Speak for Yourself Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) app has just been released…FINALLY! We’ve been working on this update for a long, long time. If you were at the American Speech, Language, and Hearing (ASHA) conference in November of 2014, I may have shown you a test version. Seriously. The irony is, at…