18/08/2023
Incredible!!
Today at Cerebral Palsy clinic Nathaniel’s neurologist asked how his summer was going.
Nathaniel responded, “Andrew’s house go.”
“You went to Andrew’s house? Who is Andrew?”
“Brother,” Nathaniel said. “Canyon baby walk and talk.”
Nathaniel reported on our visit to Texas last week to spend time with his brother and family including a little niece. The doctor, nurse, and PT made a fuss over Nathaniel being an uncle at age ten. I prompted him to talk more, “Tell them what Andrew has in his front yard.”
Nathaniel paused for a long moment. Everyone waited. A victory in itself. He turned to his device and said “table.”
Blank faces around the room. The nurse laughed. Nathaniel hid in my shoulder in shyness as he realized his communication wasn’t clear.
“Explain more, buddy,” I encouraged. I had no idea why he said table either.
He said “table horses,” adding a +S suffix to make the word horse plural. Again a victory. But I still didn’t understand why he said table.
The doctor, who studies brains and was brilliantly tracking with Nathaniel better than anyone else in the room jumped up excitedly. “STABLE!” she said. “Your brother has a stable and horses!”
“Yes,” Nathaniel said.
Table is probably the closest word Nathaniel has on his device to stable.
“Wow,” I said aloud. And without thinking I threw a fist in the air like a mom at a football game whose quarterback son just rushed for a game winning touchdown.
“You can say that again,” the doctor replied to me.
Nathaniel and the doctor went on to talk about how many horses are in Andrew’s stable and if Nathaniel rode them.
As the doctor suggested, I kept saying wow over in my head. Wow! That was genius on Nathaniel’s part. Wow! The doctor expected Nathaniel’s competence and searched for meaning. Wow! He used rhyme to get as close as possible to what he wanted to communicate. Wow! He tried again. He gave more info when his communication broke down. Wow! We’ve never talked about words that rhyme with table. He made that connection independently. Wow! AAC plus literacy instruction is pretty incredible.
AAC intervention is insufficient without comprehensive literacy instruction. It isn’t enough to get devices into kids’ hands and teach them a couple core AAC words over the course of the school year. That model was ten years ago when we started our AAC journey. I’ve long said parents are starting to expect more. Because of kids like Nathaniel, doctors who know brains are going to start expecting more too. Wow!
