Robin Hurd

Back to School

by Robin Hurd

Well, it’s back to school time. Time to get new school clothes for those longer legs that grew over the summer. Time to get new foot orthotics (that’s ankle braces for those of you who don’t experience this) and get used to them. Time to get ready to explain your child to a new batch of teachers.

Can you relate? Each year, there is an adjustment period for kids and teachers alike as they get to know each other. For those of us whose kids use AAC, this adjustment can be even more time consuming. Every one of us operates with certain assumptions of what a child should know. Often times, our children blow these assumptions out the water for their teachers. The main reason this happens is the language delay our children experience.

Because our children have generally not had a way to practice telling people things at the age when normally developing children do, certain assumptions do not apply. Last year, Joshua’s teacher assumed that he should know that he is to wave at her when she said “hi” to him at the door. For Joshua, who spent the first 4 years of his life unable to say “hi”, and only 6 months before he entered her class developed the hand skills needed to do a wave, the idea that he should wave in response to a “hi” was certainly not something he understood. Josh knew that he should smile when greeted by an adult, but this waving thing was all new. What became a big frustration for the teacher was really an issue born of his language delay.

Our job, as parents, is to help our child’s teachers understand how our children’s language development affects them. Too often, people assume that the hardest part of using a communication device is learning to find the words you want. While that may be true for adults who have learned to talk before their disability, for our children, learning how to use language is a big part of the skills needed to be successful. And that includes those related social skills, like greeting others!

A way to help teachers work more effectively with your child is to encourage them to focus on core vocabulary words. Core vocabulary words are the very basic words that most of our sentences are full of. Too often, schools want to focus our child’s attention to the fringe words that are listed in their textbooks as vocabulary words. Soon, the child has words like “Jupiter, Neptune, rocket, asteroid” in his device, but may not know how to say a basic sentence like, “the sun is very hot.” If we can change our focus to these very basic words, our children can not only communicate about the topics they cover in science class, but can also communicate many other things in many other situations.

Next month, we will talk about how to ask the right questions to get answers that use varied parts of speech, instead of just naming objects. Please send your questions to parents@aacinstitute.org. We would love to hear from you!