Well, I had a much different blog post in mind this morning, guess we’ll save that one for another day. I woke up to the sound of Abbey throwing up. My first reaction was, ‘oh, my poor Abbey’, but then my second…’Ohh ohh, I can teach her how to tell me she has to throw up!’
Yes, you have to grab those opportunities to teach them to communicate when they come up! That is an important lesson I have learned over the years, with Abbey. There are so many things she won’t understand me trying to teach, unless they are happening, like something hurting, being angry or like today, throwing up. If I tried to teach her how to communicate these things to me when they were not happening, she wouldn’t get it.
So, she has an “I feel” button on her home page of Proloquo2Go, that has feelings like happy, sad, angry, etc.. I once again used “list view,” another great opportunity to use this feature. And, I made some of the buttons different colors, like happy is green, angry is red, tired is blue, hungry and sick are blue too, etc.. (She has to scroll down to get to some of them.) This morning we added the ‘throw up’ button, that speaks “like I have to throw up” when she presses it. I moved it up to the top for easy access for today. There is a great picture in Proloquo2Go’s picture library of a sick face beside a toilet, for a ‘throw up’ button, but I had to go with a picture of our ‘throw up bowl’ as Abbey doesn’t understand to throw up in the toilet yet. Last time she was sick was when we taught her to use a bowl, which was a wonderful thing!:)
I actually put a ‘hurt’ button in her ‘body parts’ folder and in her ‘feelings’ folder. Last time her ear hurt, we went to her body parts folder and worked on communicating that her ear hurt.
So, what opportunity do you have today, to teach your little one to communicate? Grab them while you can!
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abbeysvoice 