Why We Didn't Use AAC At All Yesterday

(a (hypothetical) letter from a parent to a therapist)*

Dear SLP,
We didn't use the talker at all yesterday. Not one little bit. I had plans to use it---no really, I did! I had a whole activity in mind! What happened, you ask? Life, homework, and life again.

To start with, things are busy here. I was only home with Maya for 90 minutes, and you might as well call that 45, once you subtract the home-from-school 20 mins (that's for putting coats and shoes away, reviewing items in backpack, fixing a snack, etc.) and the Mom's-about-to-leave 25 mins (that's for making and serving dinner, packing my bags for school, finding the papers that I've misplaced since the morning, etc). So 45 mins. During that time, today, we had to make Maya's "100 Days" poster for school.

Maya had already said she wanted to show 100 cotton balls, and I had cut out "jars" for the cotton balls. I thought about all of the ways that we could use the talker for that project. We could talk about how the glue feels, or counting. Grouping cotton balls, putting them in jars, moving them around, a top row of jars and a bottom row. We could talk about how the cotton balls feel, where cotton comes from, what things in our home are made of cotton. We could make piles of extra cotton balls, or little snowmen, or pretend that they are marshmallows that we could gobble up.

I was ready. I was invested. I was energized!

But Maya was tired. Turns out the Valentine's Day dance had wiped her out. There was much staring into space, and much resting her head on the table. Every group of ten that we counted took several re-starts, since she was kind of just moving her hands without looking and staring into the distance (and I wasn't going to do it for her, so we kept starting over). Modeling + helping to stay focused on counting cotton balls = challenging (maybe pointless?). And the counting was more important than the modeling.

And the glue. My word, the glue. Do you know what happens if you get a little glue on your fingers and then try to count cotton balls? They all stick to you. And to each other. And it's really hard to peel them off, because now they have glue on them and they just stick to your non-glued fingers (by the way, now your non-glued fingers have become glued fingers). There's no way to use a talker with gluey, cotton-ball covered fingers.

The poster was made. The talker wasn't used. But I sure invested a lot of thought ahead of time into all of the great stuff I would model while making the poster. Maybe next time.

Signed,

An AAC mom who's doing her best

*this is a true story, but not a true letter, because we don't have an SLP who assigns AAC homework or checks up on our home use (kind of wish we did!). It's provided to serve a little window into how sometimes a family "who didn't even use the talker at all after school yesterday" may have really tried their best, despite having nothing to show for it in the data log. AAC professionals, the best way for you to foster AAC carryover at home is to create an open dialogue in which families feel comfortable (and not judged) sharing their barriers to home use. Then you can help supply short, simple-to-implement ideas to help increase AAC use at home!

(image is Maya and Will sitting together before Maya's bus came this morning. She is holding her completed 100 days poster. Will is making a silly face because he was saying "look at this poster!"---but he liked this picture and told me to use this one)