Silly Situations

Sabotage

Assistance

Choice Making

There are many occasions when two or more options for activities or materials can be presented to children. In order to encourage children to initiate language, the choice should be present­ed nonverbally. Children may be most encouraged to make a choice when one of the items is preferred and the other is disliked. For example, the adult may hold two different toys (e.g., a big yel­low dump truck and a small red block) and wait for the child to make a verbal or nonverbal request. If the child re­quests nonverbally, the adult has the op­tion of prompting the child to verbalize ("Tell me what you want") or simply modeling a response for the child ("Yellow truck"). Children's verbal re­quests can be followed with expansions of their language ("You wanted the yel­low truck") or models of alternative forms for requesting ("Yellow truck, please").

Creating a situation in which children are likely to need assistance increases the likelihood that they will com­municate about that need. The presence of attractive materials that require assis­tance to operate may encourage chil­dren to request help from adults or peers. A wind-up toy, a swing that a child needs help getting into, or an un­opened bottle of bubbles are all exam­ples of materials that can provide a nonverbal prompt to ask for help.

Setting up a "sabotage" by not providing all of the materials the children will need to complete a task (e.g., paints and water but no paintbrush following an instruction to paint), or by otherwise preventing them from carrying out an instruction, also will encourage them to make requests. This environmental strategy requires children to problem solve and indicate that something is wrong or missing. They must first deter­mine what is needed, and this initial dis­covery may require prompts from an adult. The missing materials are cues for the children to communicate that some­thing is not right or that additional materials are needed. Sabotage is an ef­fective prompt for language when the cues are obvious and children's cogni­tive skills are sufficiently developed to make detection of the missing material easy and rapid. Sabotage should be car­ried out in a warm, engaging manner by the teacher; the episode should be brief and never frustrating to the child.

The final environmental strategy is to create a need for children to communicate by setting up absurd or silly situations that violate their expectations. For example, an adult who playfully at­tempts to put a child's shoes on the adult's feet may encourage the child to comment on the absurd situation. During snack time, an adult can set up an absurd situation by placing a large piece of modeling clay or a colored block on a child's plate instead of a cracker, then waiting expectantly for the child to initiate a verbal or nonverbal request.

Children develop expectations for the ways things should be in everyday environments. They learn routines and expect that things will happen in a par­ticular order. When something unex­pected happens, they may be prompted to communicate. Of course, children must have expectations before the expec­tations can be violated. Thus, use of this strategy must be tailored to the individ­ual skills of the children and to their fa­miliar routines. For example, a child who always stores articles of clothing and materials in a specific "cubbie" will probably notice when an adult places a silly picture over it; a child who does not consistently use a specified "cubbie" would be unlikely to notice and respond to such a change in the environment.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-29