Teaching Your Child to Communicate

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by Merely Me
Monday, October 19, 2009

When my son was two and still wasn't talking we were concerned.  By the time he was three and only had a handful of words, we were very worried.  We consulted with a speech pathologist who thought that maybe he had a pervasive developmental disorder.  One day after almost six hours of testing, my son was officially diagnosed with autism.  So now we understood why he was not talking but was still left with the task of deciding how to teach him how to communicate.  I can tell you it wasn't easy.  For one thing the experts we had hired to help him could not agree on which method to use.  I felt overwhelmed by the pressure of having to choose one way to help him to talk.  And so I decided, in the end, to use a variety of methods, each having their advantages and disadvantages.  I want to share our experience here by telling you about some of the ways in which you can help your child learn to talk and   communicate.

Object exchange system

The teacher we had for my son wanted to try this method for teaching my son to communicate.  Basically this system involves having your child hand you a tangible representation (object) in order to get something from you.  For example, if your child wanted juice they could hand you their juice cup.  My son's teacher wanted to have small objects representing some of his basic needs with magnets attached so that we could keep them all together on a metal tray or even on the refrigerator. Some of these objects included a crayon as my son loved to draw, a small juice cup, and an empty raisin box.  It took no time at all for my son to understand and use this system.   If you wish to read a much more detailed description of this method please follow this link. 

Picture exchange communication system (PECS)

This was the method which really helped my son to develop speech.  My son is very visual so this system made sense to him.  I feel the picture exchange system is a natural graduation from the object exchange system.  Here you are simply using photos or picture icons instead of objects.  Here is how we first used this system.  We took photos of my son's most desired objects like juice, milk, and raisins.  We laminated the photos and put Velcro on the back of them.  Then we attached these to a communication board (we used a manila folder).  So when he wanted one of these items we encouraged him to give us the photo of the item and we would give him the actual item.  Software created by Mayer-Johnson called Boardmaker can give you a seemingly endless supply of picture icons to use in order to implement this method. 

We found that by pairing verbal language with the pictures or photos enabled my son to increase both his receptive and expressive language.  With the use of visuals my son was talking in no time. 

If you want more explicit instructions of how to begin a picture exchange communication system here is a web site which can provide some basic training.