Many classes in the senior school have had a learning focus on conversation skills - how to improve their ability to retell events and share their news with their classmates - using the Proloquo2Go app and their communication devices. It is a tricky skill to remember an event, give all the information so that other people understand our message and to be able to create new and novel messages each day.

The main strategy is to use the Aided Language Modelling to help teach our students to communicate and learn new vocabulary in their communication systems. This strategy is where we/the communication partner talks to our students while also pointing/selecting keywords on the person's communication system (e.g. P2Go) to model different messages.

With our older students we have also been using the Colourful Semantics strategy to help our students learn how to string more than one word to produce longer, more complex and complete sentences. This is a visual strategy that includes wh- questions to help remind which words may be missing in a message and what may come next in the message. It can be linked to several pages in the P2Go setups the students use - see photo below.

The mixture of the two strategies provides an effective mix of direct teaching and modelling of new language which has led to some incredible success and outcomes for a lot of our senior students. Many students are now independently generating messages that are 3-5+ words in length and the variety of messages is exploding which is very exciting progress to see!

It is important to note that the absolute most effective strategy is to have fun - we laugh a lot with the messages, jokes and teasing we are getting better at sharing each week!

(Special note highlighting the photo of Josh who once he completed his message verbalised “Proud of myself - Well done!!” We were all very, very proud of you Josh, it’s so exciting watching your progress.)