Getting nonverbal kids thinking about how they FEEL via AAC is not easy!

Feelings in AAC

not so easy!

One thing TT has not taken easily to is expressing her feelings. While she readily sees the need to use AAC to get the things she wants, doing commenting about the general state of things, or her own frame of mind, has been a difficult leap.

We did finally have success a little while back when TT got the stomach flu. It was very important to try and figure out when she felt bad nausea coming on, versus when she wanted to just lie down and be left alone. I would use "I AM SICK" in combination with the YES/NO screen.

In the beginning, I had the feelings or "I AM" page set to stay on the page rather than automatically kick back to the homepage after the child chooses a button. The problem was that TT had a tendency to stim on the graphics, especially the funnier ones like "scary". So on the homepage, the button goes to the chooser page, and I have a duplicate button further down that takes her to a page where she can make repeated choices on the "I AM" page. We use this one when we are doing speech or other therapy, and the page also includes pronouns to comment about others. I wish I could say we are that far along to where she uses it independently! But may of our pages are for things we want to work on, and not just things she can already say.

I disagree that a feelings page is one of the first things you need when introducing your child to AAC, and actually it takes some discipline to keep trying to use it. But I have the hope that if we keep doing bits of role play and using this page with books and other elements of her therapy, that commenting about feelings will become more natural for her.