Teaching

Archie objects to me doing anything resembling ‘work’ with him, so most of the ‘work’ I do with him is incidental. For example Archie wanted to say that he would go home after school; he was signing school and home, so we transferred this to the talker and added the words ‘go’ and ‘after’.

Once a fortnight Archie has a more formal session with his speech and language therapist Nikki. She tends to use a mixed approach, so on the one hand she’ll chat with him about activities he doing, or videos he’s watching on YouTube (this works quite well as it provides an opportunity to explore vocabulary) but this is interspersed with more formal work where Archie is required to produce longer sentences.

The three videos below hopefully show these processes. The first two are an example of how we might chat about videos he’s watching:

From this we introduced the idea of ‘sun’ ‘roof’ (two separate words on the talker), and then went back to a general chat, providing practice at finding known words on the talker.

The third video shows an example of more formal teaching via some sabotage. Nikki has been working on getting Archie to produce longer sentences, and he does this beautifully; but she’s moved the apple, and so he has to produce some new vocabulary as well: