I did not post an update when I added new buttons to the soundboard. I did update howtheycantalk.org but not here. Anyway, we’ve added Water and Toy. Sophie actually did press Water the other day when I asked her to because I knew the bowl was empty (and she cares about that more than Kai does). The look on her face every time I do that says she understands, but I don’t think she understands yet that the buttons are for her to tell me things. Right now buttons are something I use before I do something she’s interested in. Like a warning or something.
As of today, Sophie and Kai have three buttons, two of which Sophie has used on purpose occasionally.
Those are Outside, Walk and Park. The chart at TheyCanTalk shows Outside and Walk as “Where” words, but we use these as “Doing” words (go outside, go for walk), so that’s how our tiles are set up.
We have a new Park button because the old one is acting up. I dunno if the battery needs changing or the button was damaged in the many trips. Sometime I’ll take time to look at it. While we were in Eden, with nothing even remotely like a Park available, I had repurposed it as a second Boop button to help Kai with target training. But I’m running out of buttons now. More are on order.
Sophie has been asking me for water with her voice and face a lot lately, so I wanted to introduce Water soon. But caveats:
It’s better to introduce words in pairs.
It’s better to hold off on food buttons if a learner is highly food oriented, as Sophie is.
We’ve been verbally modeling Play and All Done a lot lately.
So our order is probably going to be more like:
Outside
Walk and Park
Water and Toy
Play and All Done
And so on from there, but I’m waffling on the mixing and matching of items in 3 and 4 since we more heavily use “water” and “all done” verbally. How much does it matter, though?
