"Talker Therapy"

School provided an AAC device at the beginning of the school year after an evaluation last year.  School has a structure for her to use it at snack time and in some of her one on one therapy.  She has access to it all the time at home and we have been trying to focus on utilizing her "talker" to make choices.  She is great at saying "I want to watch Cars", but other than food and TV we have had limited success using it for communication.  We have worked on building vocabulary, colors, animals, shapes, and more can found in the talker and she uses it  to answer questions.  I have had a hard time taking it the next level where it is an actual communication device.

We found a speech therapist we like who uses AAC devices in her sessions at the end of last year.  I talked with her a few times to discuss the idea of talker therapy in addition to the apraxia speech therapy she already does with an apraxia specialist.  In my head, and both speech therapists agree, it is useful to have these tasks separate to focus on speech production in the two half hour sessions and expressive language with her talker in a weekly one hour session.  It took a little while to get everything in order.  This was week two of "talker therapy".  

Our new therapist is getting to know C and exploring her device.  She has shared ideas with me to help force talker use and avoid complete reliance.  We want to work on talking, and signing, and still listen to non-verbal communication, but we want her talker to allow her to communicate.  One of her suggestions was to close my eyes and tell her I need her to tell me. This forces her to use her talker to make a request, pointing or gesturing can not be effective if I can not see her.

We tried it today with her shape puzzles.  I know she knows her shapes and it was an easy starting point.  She choose the puzzle she wanted to do.  I had all the shapes.  She had to tell me the number of each shape she needed to complete the puzzle.  She tried to just grab the shapes from me a few times, but I explained she had to tell me and did an example on her talker.  Then she got it.  She did an awesome job.  We completed the flowers, fish, dog, and butterfly.