Communication Skills Through Art

In my classroom my goal is to give my students a variety of opportunities to communicate across the school day. I let my students interest guide the ways  I embed communication. I use art in the classroom to teach academics as well as communication skills. Pictured to the left are our Halloween bats we created last week. Along with the art project I created a low tech communication board. I started learning about low tech communication working with my current speech pathologist in my classroom.(She is wonderful I have learned so much from her.)  The low tech communication board gives students the opportunity to touch and build simple sentences and make requests. This board can be used for both verbal and non-verbal students. The benefit of using a low tech communication board with verbal students is that it forces them to speak in complete sentences and builds their vocabulary skills. Some children on the autism spectrum may only speak in one word utterances. The goal is to increase their knowledge of words and make requests in complete sentences. This can be a challenging skill but a low tech communication board reinforces these necessary skills. The benefits for non-verbal students is it starts to teach them to touch individual picture icons necessary to make requests. When non-verbal students have mastered a low tech communication board they can then transfer their skills to an IPAD or other AAC  communication device that fits their specific communication needs. When I create low tech communication boards I create them to mirror AAC communication devices. 

How I used low tech communication for this art project...….
Sitting in whole group instruction student request each bat body part. Touching each visual icon. 
For example, "I want mouth" the student requests. Students take turns and request each bat body part until the bat is constructed. 
A low tech communication board can be created using board maker, symbolstix  or a google document. This board was created using symbolstix program. 

Have a great week teachers. See the possible.

Dulce Xo