Which Words?

So, we’ve talked about using flashcards and modeling to help kids expand their vocabulary.  If you didn’t read that post, search “vocabulary” in the search feature on the site. But, when your child’s language is so limited and you want to teach them so much, how do you decide which words you should introduce next?

Stuff They Love

Names of things they want or love will come most easily and quickly.  The main reason for this is as they approximate the sound of the word or press the button on their communication device, you can respond quickly by giving them what they have requested.  For example, Mikey learned the word candy in about a day.  As he got older, he learned chunks of words in the same way.  He would say, “sesame street dot org” and I knew he was asking me to get him set up to play games on the website.

Immediate Environment

We all need words that are not our favorite things.  We need our kids to know what we mean when we say, “Get your toothbrush.”  We can choose words that we notice our kids need or words that will be used in upcoming IEP goals. For example, Mikey had a safety objective so he needed to learn phrases like fire alarm, fire drill, exit, etc…

How

Many of the words we discussed, like toothbrush and exit can be taught using flashcards with various photo examples of the word in question. As your child grows and learns, short video clips might be needed to teach things like fire drill.  Then, once your child has the prerequisite vocabulary, they’ll be better prepared to handle the goal at school.

Maintenance

For almost a decade, we kept a large shoebox of mastered words, questions, family members, friends, pets…all on flashcards.  When we had some free time, we might take 2-3 minutes to maintain these words.  If vocabulary is hard for your child, don’t let them avoid it. Instead, make it quick, fun and as easy as possible. Maintenance work was always fun for Mikey because he would almost always get everything right.  As a kid who had to work extra hard to learn things in the first place, maintenance work gave him a chance to show how far he had come.  It was easy to tell that made him proud!