Product Review: AAC Daily Item Requesting Activity by SpeechPage

Hello and thank you for stopping by Twin Sisters Speech & Language Therapy LLC today in order to read about a wonderful product from SpeechPage Publishing Company called: AAC Requesting of Daily Items Activity in 4D

When you buy the Intro to AAC Requesting Daily Items Activity 4D, you will you receive 24 daily item pieces and 24 matching AAC symbols that are designed to introduce common vocabulary of functional items such as clothes, snacks and bathroom items. The best thing is that each item arrives at your door laminated!  Oh, how we love ignoring our own laminator by buying pre-laminated items that are already cut out for us!  This is just dreamy! Laminated items are of course the best to have.  The lamination makes the items durable and available for repetitive uses for many years and this makes them the best purchase for your money.  The other wonderful element is that many of the items from SpeechPage come velcroed or Velcro ready for interactive movement during a planned speech therapy session.  This is the style of therapy that Shanda and I both perform with our younger students and that is why we are big fans of SpeechPage products!  

Now to show you how to use this wonderful product!  To start, here are pictures of two of the boards included in the packet. 

The first board shown is the board that provides pictures of snacks and drinks.  The pictures can be matched up together up on the pictured table or taken off one by one upon therapist request.  We asked one of our less verbal students with an Autism diagnosis to pick a picture and to put it on the pictured table to show us an item that they like to have at snack time at their house. This child's receptive language skills are higher than his expressive communication and we have seen him follow 2-step commands without error and so he was able to pick up the picture of the popcorn and the milk that was laid out in from of him. He then put it on the picture of the table.  He did a great job communicating via AAC that he likes popcorn and milk by demonstrating those choice of pictures! 

From there, we gave some simple "yes" and "no" questions about milk and popcorn.  For instance, "Is milk cold?" "Do you like butter on your popcorn?" After that, we even took a side trip to the clinic kitchen to make popcorn! We wanted to show him how the act of choosing a picture of an item wanted can turn into a reasonable request for an actual item.  It was fun to watch the popcorn pop in the microwave and it gave us an awesome opportunity to practice our /P/ sound by saying, "pop". 

The AAC request activity provided us with a great tool to help demonstrate to the child and to the child's mother who was present that communication boards do work well for helping to communicate wants and needs to others.  They also serve as a wonderful catalyst for speech production and encourage the use of verbalization's along with the use of the communication board.  They are very useful for helping to increase communication outside of the speech therapy session and into the students home and school environments.  They really can be the best answer for the non-verbal child and this AAC item is a wonderful way to practice to see if a child is able to use one.

And in this picture we are working with an older more verbal child.  We have asked him to produce a full sentence in order to request the picture to fill up his pictured bathroom sink area.  For example, he was provided with an initial model sentence, but was then asked to produce the full sentences on his own like: "May I have the toothbrush?"  He then placed the toothbrush near the sink on his bathroom item themed AAC mat after his request and after Shanda handed it to him. He and Shanda had a wonderfully interactive speech session!  The child was able to work on receptive language by following directions and also articulation and verbal expression.  It was found out from this sentence level interaction that the child needed to work on a slower rate of speech and over-articulation of some sounds to improve his intelligibility.  They even worked on one specific sound after it was found to be distorted in sentence length speech.  One that was not distorted at the word level. So that was a good catch! 

There are a number of productive uses for these AAC requesting boards.  We have used them for practicing direction following and other receptive language tasks, articulation and verbal expression, and even for helping to build vocabulary.  We love knowing that we have them in our therapy tool box to be used at anytime and we hope that you may consider purchasing them for yourself. You can purchase the wonderfully colorful and durable AAC Daily Items Requesting Activity Packet for $26.94 on line at Speechpage.com.  The awesome thing is that I just read that they are currently having a sale too!  It looks like you can save an additional 8% off your order by entering the code TAKE8  at checkout!  Isn't that great?!

Have a wonderful day and thank you for reading about this product!

 Manda & Shanda, SLPs

Twin Sisters Speech & Language Therapy LLC

*Speechpage provided a copy of this product for the purposes of this review. The opinions are our own.