Home for the Holidays! AAC Strategies for Parents and Caregivers
Updated: 2 days ago
Happy holidays from the Forbes AAC team! Holiday season means time spent with family and friends. Here are some AAC strategies to incorporate at home during this holiday season!
Focus on implementation! Rebecca Eisenberg (2020) suggests reviewing key intervention strategies with parents and caregivers.
Communication functions - it's important that AAC users learn to use their AAC system to communicate a wide range of communicative functions. It's not just about requesting! Teaching the use of the AAC system for communicative functions such as protesting, questioning, commenting, or describing, can open up an AAC user to many new vocabulary words and language functions.
Modeling - this is how we use AAC to teach AAC! The communication partner, such as the parent or caregiver, provides spoken words along with AAC symbols during communication tasks (ASHA, n.d.). Check out this resource from Forbes AAC on modeling: Modeling for AAC
Review the Do's and Don'ts of AAC (Farrall & Niemeijer, 2015) here: Do's and Don'ts of AAC
Things to DO:
Do use the AAC system to talk to yourself and model for the AAC user
Do provide plenty of wait time
Do respect multimodal communication
Do provide access to AAC all day, every day
Do ask open-ended questions
Things NOT to do:
Don't say "now show me on your talker"
Don't demand a user demonstrate prerequisite skills
Don't expect an individual to know how to communicate using AAC without you modeling how
Don't limit access to a user's AAC system
As a clinician, it's important to answer both the asked and unasked questions (Zangari, 2001). It is common that parents and caregivers leave evaluation/treatment se