Why should you use visuals in speech therapy? Because they do help our students! If you don’t already use visuals in your speech-language therapy sessions, these reasons to use visuals will convince you.  If you already use them, you’ll still love the great links for resources!

Visuals Aren’t Just for Autism!

Memory

Visualizing is a well-known memory aid, but it isn’t an automatic skill! Practice with remembering images is one way to start.  Remember those ‘What’s Missing?’ activities where kids need to remember the details of the original picture? It is a fun way to build memory skills! Or try using ‘What’s Wrong with this Picture?’ activities to work on visualizing, sentence structure, and describing skills.

Auditory Processing

Visuals help with auditory processing skills. It is easier to understand an oral message when a student has a picture.  But, make sure that picture is directly related to the words you are saying.  Adapted books are a great way to incorporate this tactic. Pictures help connect the words to the concepts so your students can retain the main idea in working memory.

Expressive Language

Use visuals to build expressive language skills. When students use pictured words to formulate sentences, they can begin to see the pattern of the sentence structure. Repetitive practice and color coding help to build and maintain these skills. Picture flip books for building sentences are another fun way to build sentence skills.

Sentence Structure

Older students benefit from visual cues for expanding sentences. They often need help with identifying the types of relationships between the ideas in sentences so that they can produce compound and complex sentences. Using a visual cue with the different options helps with the retrieval of the information. If they can see the choices, they are better able to concentrate on figuring out the relationship and transition word that is needed. Expanding sentences doesn’t have to be a difficult skill!

Articulation

You can even use visuals with articulation skills. Picture or symbol sentences decrease the linguistic demands for sentence formulation. Then students can put all their efforts into the motor aspect of sound production in connected speech and be more successful. This is especially useful when working with preschool students who have some motor planning issues. Once you get to working on speech sounds in word combinations, it is so helpful for our little ones to see the phrases while they concentrate on producing the sounds. It is a win-win for working with kids who have both speech and language difficulties.

Pacing

Use visuals to help with pacing. Some students find it hard to slow down their pace even at the syllable and word levels so they can coordinate the new movement. Use simple visuals like alphabet letters with spaces between the target sound and the rest of the sounds to help them see that they need to slow down. Start with the target sound a little distance away at first. Then move it closer to the rest of the word as the child achieves correct productions.

Behavior

How about using visuals to aid with behavior? Place a visual reminder of the target behavior to help students stay on task without interrupting the others in the group. Or, use a token board to give more immediate feedback on the desired behavior. A huge variety of token boards can be found in the exclusive section of the LLL Resource Library.

The LLL freebie, Visual Guide for Autism and Speech Therapy, includes a speech session schedule that helps you review attending behaviors at the beginning of every session. So useful when working with little ones!

• Our hands and feet are still,
• Quiet mouth,
• Eyes are looking,
• Ears are listening,
• So our brains can think.

Visuals help everyone to function! What would you do without your phone’s calendar and planner?

Read More about how to Use Visuals!

If you want to find out more about ways to use visuals in your speech/language therapy sessions, be sure to check out all of the posts below!

Collette from The Speech Meadow

Visual Supports for Children with ASD

Using Visuals to Support Communication from National Council for Special Education

FREE Resource Links!

It is so time-consuming to create visuals for all of your work with students! We never seem to have enough visuals for our speech/language therapy sessions, even if our students are verbal.

To start, be sure to sign up for the LooksLikeLanguage emails. You will get the free Visual Guide for Autism and Speech Therapy right away. Then be sure to open the quarterly emails for the really helpful tips and resources from the free section of the blog.

Then, check these out! There’s a variety available, from those designed for non-speaking students with autism to those designed to help your students in academic placements.

Visual Supports and Autism Toolkit from Autism Speaks

Printable Templates, Diagrams, Forms & Charts! from Education World

Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies from Edutopia

Graphic Organizers from Freeology

Visuals for Expressive Communication

So much of SLP efforts are put toward increasing comprehension skills since that is needed to succeed in the classroom. As SLPs and special educators, though, we need to also give our students a voice! Whether they can use pictures, words, or a combination of both, helping kids to be able to express their needs, wants, and ideas is a core skill.

If you love file folder activities but also want to improve your students’ sentence skills, check out file folder language and literacy activities!

Read more about how helpful these file folder activities are. And learn how to make your own for free!

Enjoy!

How do you get the iPad away? If all your autistic student wants to do is play on the iPad, it can lead to lost sessions when you abruptly take it away. Autistic students learn a lot from visual teaching methods. But are we doing them any favors in the long term by teaching this way? Students with autism need our help to attain social skills and learn how to interact with others. One step that makes this possible is to get the iPad away.

It is all about change.

It comes down to this basic problem: how to get students with autism to vary the kinds of work they will do and work through change. With big stakes when it includes an iPad!  Students with autism prefer the familiar, just like many of us. They are also visual learners. This makes screen time very enticing, but also limiting. Token boards can be a link to help students with autism to learn to vary their activities and work through change. We’d love to spend all of our time doing our favorite things, but that wouldn’t make us productive adults. And our students need to learn this, too!

Change Is From Your Student’s Perspective

Students with autism need to learn to cope with change. But it is best to make the changes small. It is also helpful to intermix new work with learned skills. And when the iPad is involved, it helps to make a connection between the content on the screen and the activity you want them to do.

This serves a few purposes:

• Previously learned skills are better maintained.
• Reduces the pressure off of constantly dealing with the unfamiliar.
• Expands the learned content in different activities, which aids generalization.
• Gives students the chance to develop social skills.

What Are Small Changes?

You have to watch your student’s behavior to find out what types of changes trigger anxiety. And be sure to talk to teachers. They will get to know your students faster than you can.

Visual changes can be difficult for some students. It can even be something so simple that we don’t notice it! For example, a worksheet can seem new if pictures to be matched are in squares where there used to be circles. It can take some detective work to figure out what made an activity overwhelming to your student. Especially if they have multiple learning challenges.

One small change at a time leads to success. So, if the new worksheet has squares instead of circles, don’t vary the pictures that are inside the shapes. Or you could adapt the worksheet so that most of the pictures are in circles. This helps your student see that it is the same work they know how to do.

Maybe your goal is to expand the number of answers on a worksheet. Then don’t change the format. Work on varying the shape used afterwards. Does this give you an idea of how to approach making small changes?

To summarize, make changes in the type of work small (from the perspective of the student) and keeps lots of familiar review work in every session.

How do token boards help?

Token boards help student with autism see how much work they are expected to do. They know when a difficult task will be done. And they see what they will get to do when the work is finished. We are used to doing this verbally, but our students with autism need to see it.

Words go very quickly in time, sometimes too fast to process. Pictures last in time. They stay there to look at for reassurance when work seems overwhelming. It’s a visual “I can do this!”

Start small. Make small changes. Expect it to take a while, but it can be done.

First, is your student familiar with token boards? If so, you can skip down some steps to start where you are SURE this will be a success. Next, remember that this is a detailed possible sequence of steps. Adjust it to your situation and your student. And always start a new session at the last completely successful step. Don’t expect to start where you ended the last time. Just figure your students will regain the steps more quickly each time.

How to use a Token Board to Get the iPad Away

1. Set up the token board for just one response. That means that only one token will be in the work area on the bottom.
2. Work toward the goal of the student being able to hand the iPad to you. Make sure they understand the direction ‘give me’ with a visual. Put the iPad off to the side with the token board on top of it. Tell the student to give you a neutral object they don’t want (say a pencil.) Quickly move the token up and hand them the iPad. Set a timer for them to play for a minimal amount of time.
3. Get the one token ready again when the student is playing. Place the token board and the pencil on top of the iPad when the timer goes off. Give the direction, ‘give me.’ Move the token up, take it off the iPad, and give the student access again. Practice these movements so you can do them quickly!
4. Do these steps as long as you need to until the student is no longer agitated when iPad time stops briefly. Be sure to start at the beginning next session if it took the whole session to achieve this. Note how long it takes this time to show progress.
5. Now your student has to learn to give you the iPad instead of the pencil.
6. Next, start decreasing the amount of time the student spends playing in between work time.
7. Always watch for when the student can do a step without showing signs of anxiety.
8. Then use quick activities to extend the number of responses/tokens, building one at a time. The activities should be simple, rote, and familiar. Maybe simple directions like ‘clap hands’, placing puzzle pieces, or file folder matching. The student stays in charge of the iPad game while learning to set it aside for gradually longer periods of time.
9. Add in some easy work related to your IEP goals. For example, intermix the basic commands with a labeling task until 5 or 10 tokens are done. (Remember you control the amount of work to be done by how many tokens are in the work area.)
10. Keep working on the progression until your student can do a complete activity before gaining access to the iPad. It also helps to have the activity be similar to whatever they enjoy most on the iPad. Is it a TV character? A visual matching game? Figure out what it is, use screenshots from that activity to use in your speech work.

Make a Personal Connection

Use this time to get to know your student’s stress reactions. And be sure to have some fun!

Build basic social interactions, such as laughing over something or looking briefly as you give it. Interact in a happy, natural way. Use simple turn-taking games. Make that personal connection so that time spent with you is also rewarding to the student.

Most students probably won’t need such discrete steps. Hopefully, this gives you an idea of how you can break down new tasks into small growth steps when you need to do this. It can seem like you aren’t getting much speech work done initially, but think long-term. How much more will you be able to accomplish over the year if you can use socially interactive work after this?

Why use themed token boards?

It is just like taking screenshots of the iPad games they like to make speech/language activities. You are making connections between a familiar and preferred activity to the new activities you expect them to do. If they have to put the iPad down, looking at the token of their favorite TV character can help them change the activity and learn something new.

I can’t use licensed characters in what I make. And I obviously have no idea about your student’s preferences. But you can download this FREE editable token board set for 5 or 10 tokens and make your own!

Download this FREE editable token board template so that you can personalize it! It is in Google slides, but you can download it as a PowerPoint file.

Teens need good social skills to be able to succeed in life. We all need good social skills, LOL! But it is our job to help prepare the teens we work with for going out into the world as independent adults. They need to be able to work in groups. It’s a life skill.

Many years of working in a special school taught me this. Students with low academics but good social skills are the ones who are able to leave the special schools. Students who don’t have good social skills are going to have problems in life no matter how high their academic scores are.

You surely have seen situations where students don’t function well in social situations with their peers. The ability to get along is made more difficult when your students have autism, an emotionally disturbed label,  nonverbal language disorder, or if they lack the necessary higher-level language skills. All of these problems are associated with social skills needs.

Do your teens often have disagreements with others?

We all have disagreements. It’s a normal part of interactions with others. But some teens have disagreements more often than others do. And they may have problems resolving those disagreements.

You have a clue that this is a social skills problem is if most disagreements end in a fight.  Or if your teen always thinks that it is completely the other person’s fault. This is a sign that some perspective-taking skills may be lacking, as usually everyone involved in an argument has played a role.

There are lots of reasons why disagreements can occur.

Think about these social skills problems.

• Did the disagreement break out because one teen misunderstood the other?
• Maybe one kid responded inappropriately because they misread nonverbal cues.
• Without perspective-taking skills, the student can’t see the other person’s point of view and may think the other person is always the one in the wrong.
• When students don’t understand the nonliteral language being used in a conversation, they can give off base responses.

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar to you? Social skills problems really impact how well our students work in groups. It can also affect their friendships and social interactions. And I know how hard it is to find appropriate level materials to address teen level needs because I searched and searched!

Now you can engage your students and improve language for real-life social skills!

Real-life social scenarios engage teens!

The free download,  is shown in these pictures. See how many different skills are included in each unit to make it easier to meet social skills needs in your mixed speech therapy groups.

Try it out to see how engaged your teens can be!

Interpreting facial expressions and body language are vital skills for teen social interactions. While the short story gives basic information, the teens in your social skills groups have to interpret the nonverbal communication to understand the problem.

Specific details are not provided. This allows students to use their own experiences to relate to the problem and stay engaged.

Each unit has a common social scenario based around a photo that can be used for improving nonverbal communication skills: facial expressions, gestures, and body language. There are discussion questions with possible answers to guide you.

Social Skills and Idioms!

The scenarios include figurative language, nonliteral language, and idioms.  This helps you work on improving higher-level language skills in your mixed groups. If your students need some extra comprehension help, don’t worry! The complete units also have a basic level scenario to start with.  It includes the vocabulary that explains the idioms to ensure that students understand the teen problem scene.

Each social skills scenario comes with discussion questions and an answer key to guide your discussion. So there is no prep involved! You can concentrate most on what each particular mixed group needs.  The packet lets you address both nonverbal language and nonliteral language while solving teen problems.

Use the follow-up worksheets for classwork or homework. What could be easier than that?

Each worksheet provides additional practice to follow up after your group discussions. Use the most appropriate for each student or use them all. The pictured worksheet gives more practice using idioms in context.

Be sure to download the free bonus pages, too. They give extra practice at a story comprehension level for your students that need it.

Summarize Social Skills Scenarios

Practice summarizing the important story details and determining cause-effect relationships with this worksheet. Did you ever listen to a student tell you about a problem and feel totally confused about what happened?  Giving clear summaries is an important life skill!

Then use the information to start determining possible solutions. Social interactions are complicated, so teens need to be able to think of multiple ways to deal with a problem. They also need to be able to predict possible consequences of varied solutions, including the emotional impact from the other person’s perspective.

Explain

With the next worksheet, students explain the problem from the character’s perspective and offer two solutions. This helps students develop more flexible thinking in problem situations. Then they choose the best solution.

Then they choose the best solution. When they do this, they should be using perspective-taking skills to explain how the chosen solution impacts all of the people involved in the problem.

Have your students tried to tell you about a problem situation? If they can’t explain why they did what they did, they could use this practice. When students gain the language skills needed for problem-solving and learn to think ahead for possible consequences, they have a better basis for improving their social interactions in real life.

Perspective Taking

The ability to take another’s perspective is vital for social skills in everyday life. Without learning these skills, we’d all be like 2-year-olds fighting over a toy. “Mine!”  “My way!”

Make sure that your teens comprehend the group discussion and retain important details with this worksheet. They take the character’s perspective to fill in a thinking bubble. It is a great social skill for teens to explain how the other person might be thinking about the problem.

Students also define idioms and explain important details from the social skills scenario on this page. It’s a great way to apply the skills learned in your discussions.

Learning Games Apply Social Skills Information.

Games are a great way to reinforce skills. Teens can practice what they learned and it doesn’t feel like work. Also, you get to see your students interacting in a less structured way that is more like real life. Pull yourself back a little during this part of a therapy session to get a better idea of what their social skills are.

The set has game cards for practicing the new nonliteral language from each scenario. There’s also a game board to work on the overall strategy terms.

You can use these cards in matching activities or with your own board games. Or download the free printable board game. You will have access to this and more freebies when you join the ‘It Looks Like Language to Me!’ Facebook group.

There are many higher language skills are covered in each scenario. That means your mixed groups will be a piece of cake. You’ll see how engaged your students are in these meaningful real-life scenarios. Then you will want more!

No worries!  There are lots more scenarios available.

Scenarios

Social Inferences 1:

• A fight before a date
• Forgetting something important
• An argument at school
• Cyber-bullying
• Getting bad news over the phone

Social Inferences 2:

• Sister problems
• Being honest in a relationship
• Teasing Trouble
• Being left out
• Getting bullied

Social Inferences 3:

• Missing Your Best Friend
• A Fight with Your Sister
• Relationship Problems
• Talking at the Movies
• Disapprove of Peers

There are free bonus pages for the literal level of ‘A Friend Picks a Fight.’  Just head on over to join my FB group ‘It Looks Like Language to Me.’

Look for the free downloads section once you join.

Are you looking for more free resources to help teens with social skills? Read this blog post.

Enjoy!

Sharing is not just for little kids! Over the years, what we share and how we do this changes. We start teaching this vital skill when children are as young as 1-2 years of age. However, we continue to grow this skill over the years. To be successful in social interactions, we share more than just our toys and possessions. We share our stories, our thoughts, our ideas, and our feelings with others throughout our lives.

Our language skills impact how we are able to share and interact.

These practical tips will make your therapy more successful at building social language interaction skills. You can even do this while directly working on other speech/language goals!

Research shows that there are many factors that have an impact on sharing behavior: understanding of ownership, impulse control, and thinking about others’ perspectives, to name just a few.

How should this affect what we do in speech/language therapy and classrooms? It is a special consideration for our autistic kids who are more likely to be bullied.

Tips for preschoolers to early elementary students

• Begin to teach sharing in activities with items that are not owned or possessed by either child, such as play activities between two characters, working on pronouns his, hers, theirs.
• Practice turn-taking between children using similar objects that are not highly preferred by either, such as puzzles, and teach pronouns yours and mine.
• Have children request toys from each other during play rather than grabbing, teaching polite words such as “Can I?”, please, and thank you.
• Teach children to wait for turns. Use vocabulary words like wait, short turn, and long turn.
• Start teaching perspective-taking skills by having them look at their peer and tell you how that child is feeling while waiting.
• Use a timer at first, if needed, but don’t stop there.  Students need to learn to be able to share of their own accord rather than being told when to share (whether in words or timer use.)
• It is okay not to share everything! When we have new toys or very special items, we don’t always want others to use them. Just don’t bring them to school. At home, keep the special toys out of sight when friends come over or designate a ‘just mine’ toy for each sibling.
• Read stories and discuss how we feel when someone grabs something, when we are waiting too long, or when we don’t get a turn.
• Helpful books for this age range are shown in the picture.

Tips for later elementary students to teens

At older ages, students have learned to share objects. Our autistic students may actually share too much, according to research. They accept unfair trades and give away more than they keep. But older students with autism may have problems relating experiences, feelings, and opinions, despite this.

Sharing: Who Wins the Game?

This is often a problem, but there are some things that you can do.

• Begin with cooperative games where there are no losers and no winners.
• Teach concepts like having fun playing the game and co-operating.
• Use games where students don’t win, but they get to make predictions about what piece or color will win. They can even change their predictions along the way!
• Learn vocabulary such as first, then, next, and change.
• Play act sore losers and poor winners versus graceful ones with the game pieces. Talk about how that makes people feel and which type of player they would choose for the next game.
• Instead of congratulating and keeping track of the winners, give points for being kind/graceful winners or losers.
• Talk about if they enjoyed playing the game.
• Keep a chart of how many times your students politely played until the game was finished.

Sign up now to get the free download ‘Everyone Needs a Chance To Win’ FREEBIE.

Sharing: Telling a Story

Make sure that your students are able to relate personal narratives. You may be surprised at who has problems with this!

• If they can only tell a fact about their weekend, rather than a cohesive story, students may demonstrate problems having age-appropriate conversations with peers.
• Students who have problems clearly and quickly retelling a plot of a tv show, movie, or video game will be left out of these conversations.
• Some students are unable to form an opinion and what they like or dislike, and why. These students may not be able to actively participate in peer conversations.

For working on narratives, learn about Story Grammar and adjust the ideas to the age level of your students.

Sharing: Feelings

What better way to have fun learning social routines for Halloween than with a little trick-or-treat play? Play is the best way to do therapy with little ones! Kids pay better attention and learn more easily when they are having fun. So if you work with preschoolers and early elementary students, try out these ideas!

Why Practice the Halloween Routine?

Halloween has become a big holiday in the US and can be a bit scary for young children or autistic kids. It is worthwhile to use your therapy time practicing Halloween routines to help familiarize them with not only the day itself but all of the decorations they will see in stores and houses. Why?

• Kids who don’t have the language needed will have a harder time participating with their peers.
• Learning the routine and playing with (a little bit scary) Halloween figures can reduce fear for kids who get frightened by Halloween.
• There are so many repetitive phrases and short sentences that you can use to build language skills:

  “Knock on the door.” “Open the door. ” “Trick or treat.”  “Thank you.” “Share it with me.” “Put it in.” “Take it out.” “Put it on.” “Take it off.”

• Kids with motor speech problems benefit from the sing-song repetition of “Trick or Treat.”  They can practice the vowel change combination even if they can’t get the whole word.

• For articulation errors, there are so many costumes and candies that you are sure to find something to get them practicing their target sound. Some ideas for the common L, R, S errors that could come up in conversations at Halloween are:
  • I’ll wear a ____ costume.                               
  • I like that candy.
  • I see a ____.                                                   
  • I’d really like to get ______.
  • Trick or Treat!                                                 
  • See what I got!
  • I’d like to get more ___.                                 
  • So where should we go next?

     

How to Practice the Halloween Routine

Books and play, of course! Combined is even better. Keeping the language simple, in a repetitive routine, lets kids get lots of practice.

Shoebox Play

Shoeboxes are so useful for making therapy materials! Glue on some construction paper, draw a door and some pumpkins, or just decorate it with some Halloween stickers. Then, punch a hole to tie some string into so you can open and close the door easily. Look what a fun Halloween activity you have!

Play using shoebox props imitates the real routine and can easily support symbol use/exchange as well as verbal language, eliciting the repetitive phrases listed above. Start by having a new friend inside the box every day. Getting excited about what new toy was inside can help preschoolers with transition problems do it easily. An added bonus for starting your sessions with play!

Introduce the name of the costume, and do the trick or treat routine before moving on to the ‘work’ you need to accomplish that session. After a book and some activities that reinforce the skills being worked on, the kids can have a little free play with the toys at the end of the session.  Toys, where the costumes come on and off, are certainly worth keeping your eyes peeled for when you are at garage sales!

Toys

Be on the lookout for toy sets that let kids easily dress play figures. You may recognize the  Halloween set in the photo from your childhood days. It is a great example of easily putting on and taking off Halloween costumes.

If you can’t find these at a garage sale, don’t worry!  Kids like to pretend, so you can use any toy kids to play with. Just cut out pictures of Halloween costumes in the approximate size and put them on the figures with poster putty. It shouldn’t do any damage as long as you take it off before storing it.

Of course, don’t use poster putty with kids who still put objects in their mouths!

iPad Play

Limiting screen time is recommended for children, so make your iPad time a valuable learning experience! While particularly useful for teletherapy since you can still practice the trick-or-treat routine, it won’t be 3D!  If you are working with a child in person, be sure to combine hands-on activities along with iPad use, especially if your student has autism.

Using a paper duplicate of the onscreen activity can be a good way to help autistic children start to interact in real life. Since they are already familiar with the activity, the new skill is playing it with a person.

Just take screenshots or photos of the activity steps that require interaction.  Work on identifying and practicing each of these steps outside of the routine until your student can do it. Then put it back into the shortened routine. Build up until they can do the entire activity in an interaction with you. Gaining access to the iPad version is their reinforcement for playing the routine in person.

If you love this idea and want to have it ready to go, check out the ready-made version at my TPT store! You can print it and play it! The interactive version plays on PowerPoint and iPad. It even includes real knocking sounds and children’s voices saying, “Trick or Treat!”

Another option is to make your own Trick or Treat book! Just join the LLL email list to download the freebie.

Make your students’ screen time effective! Incorporate language skills for real-life routines in their screen time play to help generalization. Try it this Halloween!

When a member of the family has sensory processing problems and sensitivity to noises, outings like fireworks can be tough. While commonly found in children with autism spectrum disorders, other kids may have this problem, too. Here are some helpful tips to deal with sensory problems such as fireworks. They can also be adapted for noisy family outings, too!

If your child covers their ears when a fire alarm goes off, or a loud vehicle drives by, going to see fireworks or joining a noisy family outing may not be the happy event you were hoping for.

Free Download

Here’s a free social rules story, quick to print, staple and read, that I’ve made to help you out. Just click here.  While the topic is going to see fireworks, the ideas and tips are useful for any noisy gathering.


This is no guarantee that this will make your fireworks event problem-free.  However, knowing what to expect, having a coping method, and discussing any issues is a great start to dealing with sensory problems.

5 tips for sensory problems on family outings

Having back up plans as parents can be helpful, too. Some ideas that could be helpful include:

Watch

• watching your child with sensory problems for the beginning signs of sensory overload. Intervening early is often more successful than waiting for full-blown overload.

Signal

• having a signal your child can give you to tell you that they have had enough.

Seating

• getting seating that is toward the back of the crowd. This may not only somewhat decrease the noise level from the fireworks, but can also reduce the overcrowdedness that can also be a problem for some children.

Boundaries

• having a larger blanket than you need so that your child has a place to sit with boundaries that keep crowds further away.

Additional vehicle

• coming with 2 cars so one parent can leave earlier if needed, or having a plan for one parent to remove the sensory child before overload occurs to the car. Have calming toys, blankets, headphones, or whatever works for your child to use during the wait.

If your child regularly has problems with sensory processing issues, get an appointment for an evaluation with an occupational therapist who is knowledgeable about the problem. That is where most of my knowledge comes from!

Book Suggestion

I also found this book to be extremely helpful when I read it many years ago. It is written in a way that is helpful to parents and educators.

I hope that some of these ideas help to make your 4th of July and noisy family outings fun and calm!

How in the world do you teach children to accept ‘no’?  Give choices! While this is not always an easy task, these tips for how to help children accept ‘no’ by making choices will surely help if you use them!

My friend, Lisette, over at Speech Sprouts, asked what I did to help kids understand and accept ‘no’. It takes a lot of work and very few 2-3 year-olds will easily accept ‘no’ for something they truly want! But there are some strategies you can use to help kids start moving along the path to accepting ‘no.’

Avoid yes or no questions! Give choices instead.

Be careful how you word your questions! Asking a child, “Do you want A ?” implies that you are asking them for their wishes. This leaves it open for them to say, “No, I want B.” when B is not an option. Then you have to say “No.”

Instead, try “Today we have A or B. Which one do you want?” While some kids will then reply, “I want C!” this leaves it open for you to say, “I like C, too, but today we get to pick from A or B.”  You notice that this response did not include the ‘N’ word! Sometimes just hearing that word sets some kids off!

To make it even more visual, hold up the two items that the child can choose from. If your kid says something different, you can just answer, “I have this and this. Which one do you want?”

Choice boards help kids learn to handle ‘no.’

To do this visually, use a choice board!

Visuals are important to help kids see the choices, even for verbal kids. They don’t have to be fancy, just a ‘no’ item and 2 pictured choices.

• Place the ‘no’ symbol on the item that isn’t a choice. This item can even be the cabinet where snacks are stored.
• While they see the ‘no’ symbol, they also see that there will be other choices available.
• Without the visual, they will hear the ‘no’ and can have a meltdown before processing the other choices.

Practice accepting ‘no’ in a less emotional context first.

First, help your students understand ‘no’ (whether visually or verbally) in activities where they don’t care as much. Don’t start teaching using their favorites! Build up to hearing ‘no’ when it actually is something that the child wants.  Let them learn first that there will be other good options, even if not their #1 choice.

Note: Some students are just not able to handle ‘no’ for various reasons. But don’t make the mistake of giving in to tantrums or outbursts and give them what they want! As painful as it can be to outwait a sobbing or screaming child, you will only be making it more likely that it will continue if you give in.

Here are some tips and ideas for how to slowly build a child’s acceptance of hearing ‘no.’

5 strategies to help children with ‘NO’

Make the ‘NO’ choice a ‘no’ for someone else.

See this picture? I  never had a kid get upset when they couldn’t feed a make-believe chocolate chip cookie in shoebox play. It is great practice for realizing that sometimes there is another choice that is okay. Read more here.

These steps help build a child’s ability to gradually accept ‘no’ during increasingly meaningful situations. Save saying ‘no’ to their favorites until your child realizes that ‘no’ is not always the end of the world. But if they react with a meltdown, divert their attention and go back to the last successful step the next day. Children with autism may need these more specific steps in order to build choice-making skills for accepting ‘no.’

Note that the pictures are about cookies, but you can try this with toys, activities, or other favorites, too!

1. Make the ‘NO’ choice something that the child doesn’t like.

This is a great place to start for kids who just react to the word. Hearing ’no’ gets a bit of desensitization when it is used for something unwanted.

2. Make the ‘NO’ one of 3 equally liked choices.

Switch the cookie pictures around from day to day just to help your child see that sometimes we run out of their favorites. Keep the empty cookie bag and place a no symbol on it to show that it is not available.

Or do this to help them to learn that variety can be fine. It is easier to choose and see/hear ‘no’ when we like all of the choices.  If needed, take a break for a day and just give your child their favorite cookie.

Caveat: If your child is a picky eater, do not do this with food! Try toys instead.

3. Make the ‘NO’ be the 2nd favorite.

Making a choice to eat your favorite is easy! This step reinforces that ‘no’ is not always a bad thing. It also gets them ready for the next step.

4. Make the ‘NO’  be their favorite choice.

But be sure the 2nd favorite is a choice. It also helps to have an empty chocolate chip cookie bag available for the child to see that there are no cookies in it. This can make settling for 2nd choice easier.

5. Build sabotage into your daily routines!

Change things up on occasion:

• The crayon box can be empty, so kids have to choose from markers or colored pencils instead.
• The Lego basket is empty, so they have to choose a different building toy instead.
• The box of their favorite cereal is empty, so they have to eat something different.
• Their favorite shirt is in the washing machine, so a different choice needs to be made.

You get the idea! Learning that there are changes and new choices to be made in life is tough learning for little ones, especially anxious little ones! But by presenting it in a way where there are positive outcomes as well as negative
ones, many children can start to take it in better stride.  No miracles, just slow, hard work.

Some little ones, especially kids on the autism spectrum deal with so much anxiety and have so many specific preferences that this method won’t work on its own. Talk to your child’s team, then, to get a broader approach that is specific to your child.

Your student with autism picks up the toy and sets it back down again. Maybe he lines them up or maybe she tries to roll them. Then they ignore them entirely. We know that developing children’s play skills is vital for expanding cognitive skills and communication growth. So what is an SLP to do?  Try these shoebox play and file folder activity tips for teaching the core vocabulary word ‘EAT!’

How to develop skills for shoebox play

With neurotypical children, the goal of therapy is to develop as many of the missing skills as possible. Then we work on expanding the skills upward towards a higher chronological age level.

A different viewpoint can be more helpful for kids on the autism spectrum. It can be useful to develop therapy goals by advancing one functional skill as broadly as possible. Then a new, higher-level skill can be added.

Kids with autism need to develop a deep understanding of a skill or idea to help them generalize. Use lots of different pictures, photos, and activities! Work on using the skill functionally in many different contexts to help them generalize skills.

Get started by choosing a basic set of core vocabulary words and determine the symbol level to use. Then teach the core words and bring the vocabulary into basic sentence structure. The photos below can help you see a possible therapy plan.

Plan activities that add some pragmatics, like requesting, commenting, and ‘no,’ to build in functional communicative uses. Generalizing skills to real-life situations needs to be built into your therapy plan. Try developing your therapy goals by advancing one functional skill as broadly as possible. For example, after choosing your core words, think about how many different language skills can be taught using those words during the year.

Play skills, literacy skills, and communication go hand in hand.

Teach literacy and play skills using the same words. This gives your student the visual equivalent of word association skills. Building word knowledge and use, before adding a slightly expanded skill, helps kids with autism tie all of the pieces together.  Language file folder activities and shoebox play are two great methods to build these skills!

This way, you build your student’s play and communicative skills together. They go hand in hand.

Adding to previously learned skills helps maintain what your student already learned. Expand skills in a way that only adds one new piece at a time. This makes learning more achievable and successful.

Would you want to go straight to the final in your most demanding class or learn each step a little at a time? Working in little chunks makes learning less intimidating and frustrating.

Try basing as many of your therapy goals as possible around a functional core word.  The core verb ‘eat’ is a fun way to start.

Start with a set of toys and a nice sturdy box to visually show how to play.  Shoeboxes are great, but any sturdy box can do!

Assess understanding of symbol levels: Core Word ‘Eat’

You also have to determine the symbol level the student understands. If your student with autism has limited communication skills, multiple needs, and is not responding to standard symbols, try this out. Maybe you need to use a different type or size of symbols for comprehension.

This photo shows a way to use a ravioli plastic and play food in a simple matching activity. The symbols are at varying levels, from cut out photos or TOBIs, (True Object Based Icons that show the object’s shape) to photos, and then symbols.

Matching tasks can help determine the symbol level.

Students are likely to choose the most meaningful symbol for matching.

In this example, the student matched the play fruit to the TOBIs, so that is the type of communication symbol to use.

Another matching activity to try out is to have the student match the toy fruits to the real versions.

Toys are easier to use in play activities, but students need to understand that the plastic banana represents a real banana for the concept of ‘eat’ to be developed.

Notice that this student correctly matched the fruits to the icons, including matching the purple grape toy to the green grape icon rather than the purple grape TOBI.

This shows a higher level of symbolism than in the last example. If this student understood the direction, “Match.” and this result is typical, it seems that the student is not yet at a symbolic level.

Assessing if the student uses actual objects correctly and working on developing a symbolic communication system for basic desires may be the way to go at this point in time.

Students who don’t comprehend picture symbol systems may benefit from using an object system. For example, use a spoon to request cereal.

Shoebox Play: Core Word ‘Eat’

In this picture, a shoebox has been decorated with a hungry child. He has a huge mouth cut open to place foods inside and feed him.

Be sure to point at the symbols as you say them. This is so important for helping your student connect the word to the symbol! It’s how you model visual language.

It doesn’t matter whether they are paper symbols or symbols on an AAC device, you need to model the language. This is a vital teaching method for students using AAC. Seeing the symbols as the word is said helps students understand the words and use the symbols.

Build Expressive Skills with Core Word ‘Eat’

Teach your students with autism to point at each symbol in order as you say the sentence. This will start building expressive language skills.

This strategy helps build joint attention. Your students should be looking where they are pointing.  You say the word so they are hearing the word said verbally while they point to the symbol. This helps them learn to connect the oral word with the symbol.

Comprehension Check

Occasionally make sure to tell the student, “Take it.” and offer them an array of food toys after reading the sentence aloud.  This discrimination check helps you make sure that the student is still comprehending the symbol.

If they correctly discriminate the symbol, they will take the food toy that matches the symbol they used to finish the sentence.

Develop Commenting and Narrative Skills with the Core Wore Word ‘Eat’

Right after feeding the shoebox kid, your student now formulates a sentence to tell what the kid ate. Notice that this fulfills a different communicative function!

Instead of filling in the last food as a way of requesting what to feed the toy, the student is now using a short sentence to comment on what was eaten. It is the beginning of narrative skills.

When your students understand and produce basic sentences around the core word ‘eat’, don’t be too quick to move on only to a new core word. Think about how else this skill can be used in a different context to deepen word knowledge.

In this photo, you see an activity that works on the core word ‘eat’ in a different communicative context- learning that sometimes we don’t or can’t eat even if we want to. This reinforces and gives continued practice to the core word ‘eat’ even if other activities in the session are introducing a new core word.

Developing Symbolic Play in 2D

As students become more skilled at using 3D objects in play, start fading the shoebox if the student has the motor skills to manipulate toys without the stability the box provides.

As you move on to teaching new core words, it is important to continue to review and expand the previously learned skill sets. Maybe the student enjoys this familiar play activity now and might request it for a work break.

Maybe it is time to expand the activity to a higher symbolic level with a 2D version of the concepts. When a student is able to enjoy and participate in paper play activities, adapted books are great materials to use in therapy!

Combine books and play in therapy: ‘Eat’

Reading a book and then playing an associated activity is a great technique for reinforcing the language and plot of the story. This photo shows the cover of a simple adapted book that starts students using the core word ‘eat’ in sentences to communicate about varied foods.

Notice that initially, the symbol for ‘eat’ is in a field of 3 with familiar non-food symbols to help the student discriminate easily. Errorless learning is the best way to go! Helping your students make sentences to share information about their favorites is a great way to keep their attention and build functional skills.

Increase Difficulty in Small Steps

When your student has learned a skill, build it by applying it to new activities. Slowly add in additional steps to expand that skill. This photo shows an additional verb symbol being added in place of one of the object symbols.

Moving the symbols around helps the student keep scanning, but we now know that competent communicators using an AAC device express themselves more fluidly by using the location of the symbol on the device rather than always scanning the page.

Now the adapted book has ‘eat’ as a choice along with 2 other verbs. One looks similar to ‘eat’ and the other is different in appearance, making discrimination easier than using 3 very similar action symbols.

Many students don’t need this level of discrete steps to make progress, but if you have a student who is becoming frustrated you may need to build skills in incremental steps such as these.

I was so excited to be featured on The Speechie Show! This post gives you some more ideas about the shoebox play I discussed on the show.

If you missed it, you can see me live here!

If you are looking for more play ideas, click here for car play and here for playground ideas.

Many thanks to Barbara Bloomfield and Ron Larsen, who inspired me to explore how to develop language and play skills using visual teaching and shoeboxes.

Are you interested in learning more about shoebox tasks and visual teaching? Try these links.

Ron Larsen’s Shoebox Tasks

University of North Carolina’s TEACCH Program

Little kids get reminded by their parents all the time: “Say please.” “Say thank you.” This is how we start teaching politeness. Politeness and manners are such important social skills!  Read along for 3 ways to teach and encourage saying ‘Thank you’ even when we don’t mean it.

When friction develops, manners can keep a situation calm enough to talk it out instead of fighting. In normal everyday life, it is practice beginning to be able to take another’s perspective.

Think about it- who does saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ benefit? The speaker or the listener? Obviously, the listener or we wouldn’t have to work so hard to get kids into the routine of saying it!

Although they may say it faithfully as a learned routine, children with autism may have a difficult time understanding why it is important. Even more difficult- saying thank you when you don’t like the gift!

To help with this important skill, I have 3 ideas for you today!

1. PRACTICE the ROUTINE of Responding Thank You.

Young or nonverbal children can benefit from practicing the routine. This adapted book set will let you put items that your students like and dislike in the presents to visually teach that we still say thank you. Opening presents is such a fun activity, even when it is make-believe!

Of course, having some decorated boxes to open up and see a real toy inside is a great activity to coordinate with the book. You can read more about it here.

2. USE WORDS to Identify FEELINGS

Try this free game from my store.  Students identify how receiving different toys would make them feel and giving an appreciative response anyway. It’s fun practice for responding thank you!

(Kind feedback is always appreciated as a thank you, even though you don’t earn TPT credits for free downloads)

3. Explain Why We Respond Thank You- teaching perspective-taking skills.

This social rules story, in two versions, can help your students begin to understand why it is important to say thank you for gifts we don’t really want. And it is free for you!

The social rules stories can be used for bulletin boards after discussion. One version uses longer sentences, more difficult vocabulary, and is better used with students who have some perspective-taking skills.

The other version has shorter sentences, easier vocabulary, and stresses how what we say or do affects others’ feelings.

The worksheet is fill in the blank for students to tell about a time that they received a present. You can use this page as a basis for discussion and then let your students fill in answers that are pertinent to their lives.

Discussion questions could include:

• Did you ever get a present that you didn’t like?
• How did you react? What did you do or say?
• How did the person who gave you the gift react? What did they do or say?
• How did your reaction make them feel?
• Is that how you want that person to feel?
• What could you do differently next time?
• What could you say differently next time?
• How can you help yourself sound sincere? Sincere means you really mean it. We show that in our facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice.

You can use all of these resources at holiday time, for birthdays, or whenever your students need more practice responding thank you.

Enjoy!

Do you feel confident teaching play skills? Have you ever been asked for recommendations from parents about toys that are appropriate for their children to play with?  For more typical students, this isn’t usually difficult. But what do you say for your students on the spectrum who don’t have typical play skills?

Take your student who works happily to get some playtime with small cars, but then when he gets the cars he doesn’t actually play.

All he does is line the cars up. Sometimes the cars are in size order, sometimes they are grouped by color, and sometimes there is no apparent pattern. Is there something we should do? And what in the world do we recommend when his parents ask us?

Your student shows that he is able to categorize by features, but he doesn’t understand object functions, a skill needed for representational play.  How do we change this?

I love using shoeboxes to develop play skills for 3 reasons.

1. They make the play steps and ‘all done’ visually obvious.

2. They stabilize the toys to help with physical manipulation problems.

3. It makes one complete activity that the child can learn to do independently.

How to Design Your Own Shoebox Play Tasks

It is important to design the play shoebox so your student sees what to do and when it will be done from the visual set up.

Teach how to use 2 or more objects together in play, since that is where make-believe play begins.

Begin with toys your student shows interest in, whether by looking at them, picking them up, or otherwise interacting with the toys.

Using your student’s most favorite toy could lead to resistance when you start changing a learned, loving interaction.

Remember that when you are teaching a new skill, this is work!

So, your student will work on learning how to play but will get to line the cars up however he likes once the work is done.

The photo shows one possible way to teach pushing toy cars and using them with a ramp to play. The little boy I used this with was nonverbal, with limited play skills, but he was able to learn how to make the cars go up and down the ramps on the shoebox.

I faded the box by first using just the lid on the table, and then removing the lid. Eventually, he was able to request the color cars and ramps that he wanted and then play independently.

You know that you have made progress when your student requests cars and actually pushes them instead of just lining them up!

Don’t forget to add language skills!

This photo shows how to incorporate requesting in the activity, but communication is so much more than requesting!

Add verbs and descriptive language:
go up, go down, go fast, go slow, stop, wait, go behind, go in front, etc.

Model visually and verbally- use your student’s AAC device or make a symbol board and point to the visual language as you say it.

Adapt some car books and expand the play to toy garages, roads, and any other type of car play you can think of.

But, what about IEP goals and academic standards?

There is great pressure put upon schools nowadays to align all work to educational standards. However, if you don’t help your students develop representational language and thinking skills, how are they going to comprehend higher level academics?

And if they don’t know how to play, how are they going to develop friendships with their peers? Or the turn-taking skills that are a basis for so many social interactions? Helping students with the language for play and behavioral difficulties are vital to include in your work with students, no matter what IEP goals you also have to address.

Where to start?

1. Figure out the level of your student’s play skills.

2. Pay attention to the toys your student takes out but doesn’t use appropriately.

3. Toys your students looks at, or picks up and sets down, can indicate interest without knowledge of what to do with the toy.

Working with Parents

1. Find out from the parents what kind of toys your student pays attention to at home, and exactly what he does with them.

2. Starting with a type of toy that is available at home has the benefit of offering more chances for carryover.

3. Ask the parents to offer a few options (if they are available) as they may not realize what types of toys you are looking for.  Toys that involve just pushing buttons can be included in some other way during the therapy sessions.

Suggestions for Parents

1.  Buying a toy that is similar to one that your child learned how to play at school can be a good idea for carrying overplay skills at home if this is financially feasible.

2.  It is more beneficial for your child to have a toy he can play with appropriately than to buy a more advanced one that he doesn’t know how to use.

3.  If it is affordable, consider getting 2 of the same toy: one to work on playing within therapy sessions and the other to keep at home to help with generalization skills.

If you found these suggestions to be helpful, you will want to check out my other shoebox play blog post here.

Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter and get your free download of Getting Started with Autism now!  Enjoy!