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Post for June 8, 2018
Today was a half day at Katalemwa and Dr. Brady brought the AAC materials. Cardstock, markers, and tape for “laminating”. We started the day by making some picture/word cards, but my lack of artistic skills rendered me useless very quickly. While Bri Bowles drew the pictures we had thought would be necessary, I went back to the therapy room for observation. It was interesting, but I was thrilled when Dr. Brady came to get us because the AAC cards were ready.
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) is for children or adults who have a level of cognitive ability but need a different way to communicate. A famous high-tech example of this is Stephen Hawking. After discussing it in our group, we decided that one of the children would be a perfect candidate for no-tech AAC cards.
We started with something simple like colors and she immediately understood that. She was able to match colors to objects in the room. We then built onto that with a more complicated word, “go”. This was done with a balloon thrown to one person and only thrown back to the child if she touched the “go” card. She got this quickly too, but the next step was hard for her. We had only two cards in front of her, “go” and “yellow” (the color of the balloon). The activity was kept the same, throw the balloon to her if she touched “go”. However, she often confused the two cards. She knew that touching one would get her the balloon but if we switched the order of the two cards, then she touched the wrong card. She was connecting the activity correctly but was not recognizing the different purpose of the different cards. For this reason, Dr. Brady often emphasized the importance of keeping the activities extremely patterned.
And that was pretty much the end of our time at Katalemwa. This is a picture taken by Dr. Brady of Mrs. Claire, Bri Bowles, Sarah Geatley, and me on our last day at Katalemwa.
