Communication is one of the many things that most people take for granted. There are more than 200,000 words in the English language. The average two year old has a vocabulary of 200 words. By the time a child enters kindergarten, he will have a 10,000-20,000 word vocabulary. Now imagine going into a language based world with no usable vocabulary because of a disability or having that basic skill stripped from you due to a stroke or an accident.
A child with little or no language skills will often times exhibit frustration through behavior issues such as tantrums. He may also be withdrawn around typical children because of the language barrier. Giving a child a way to communicate is imperative to his emotional and social development. Research has shown that providing a child with communication boards will not hinder him from learning to speak. Providing him with these tools will allow him to have his needs met and reduce his frustration level while he is learning to use language. Once a child is able to use oral communication skills, the communication boards can be faded from use.
Recently, I had a friend severely injured in a motorcycle accident. After suffering a brain injury, he was left with an inability to speak. In the past few days, he has been able to answer yes and no questions by pointing to words that his wife wrote on a piece of paper. I was excited to hear of this recent development because it means that he can now communicate by using communication boards. I printed up a few simple boards that he can use to let others know what he needs.
If you are the parent of a child with a communication issue or the spouse of a person suffering from a brain injury or stroke, these boards can be useful. They can be very simple or more complex depending on the person's ability to process and their fine motor coordination. The ones that I made for our friend are quite simple as he is just coming out of a coma and could become easily overwhelmed by too much information on a page. I did include a more complex board as an example. I made these with the program Boardmaker, however they can be made using a word document and clip art. If you wish to purchase Boardmaker, it can be bought from
http://www.mayer-johnson.com/. It is one of my favorite programs and I use it almost daily in my classroom.
A child with little or no language skills will often times exhibit frustration through behavior issues such as tantrums. He may also be withdrawn around typical children because of the language barrier. Giving a child a way to communicate is imperative to his emotional and social development. Research has shown that providing a child with communication boards will not hinder him from learning to speak. Providing him with these tools will allow him to have his needs met and reduce his frustration level while he is learning to use language. Once a child is able to use oral communication skills, the communication boards can be faded from use.
Recently, I had a friend severely injured in a motorcycle accident. After suffering a brain injury, he was left with an inability to speak. In the past few days, he has been able to answer yes and no questions by pointing to words that his wife wrote on a piece of paper. I was excited to hear of this recent development because it means that he can now communicate by using communication boards. I printed up a few simple boards that he can use to let others know what he needs. 
If you are the parent of a child with a communication issue or the spouse of a person suffering from a brain injury or stroke, these boards can be useful. They can be very simple or more complex depending on the person's ability to process and their fine motor coordination. The ones that I made for our friend are quite simple as he is just coming out of a coma and could become easily overwhelmed by too much information on a page. I did include a more complex board as an example. I made these with the program Boardmaker, however they can be made using a word document and clip art. If you wish to purchase Boardmaker, it can be bought from http://www.mayer-johnson.com/. It is one of my favorite programs and I use it almost daily in my classroom. 
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