5 essential pre-verbal skills parents and professionals need to know about for early communication

The learning of a young child’s first word is an exciting moment for both parents and professionals, and especially so for those with communication difficulties. There are many skills which precede the acquisition of language, and for those with special needs, it may take a little longer to get there. 

Image by Prawny at Morguefile.com

It can be disheartening for parents waiting for the first words, but a little knowledge of pre-verbal skills and their importance in laying the foundations for later speech and language can help to set small learning goals and recognise progress in communication before language takes off.

Photo by 502artistb at Morguefile.com

1. Eye contact is needed to maintain social interaction between two people, and communication can break down if eye contact is only fleeting . It can be encouraged through everyday interactions such as waiting for eye contact before giving children something they want, or setting up motivating activities such as blowing bubbles or peep-po games.

Photo by hotblack at Morguefile.com

2. Attention is needed to understand language and concentrate on one activity. Children with communication difficulties may have a short attention span but this can be developed through playing with the same toy in a variety of ways such as building towers with bricks, lining them up to make trains, playing peep-po games, hiding bricks, making animals or people, making shapes and patterns.

Photo by jdurham at Morguefile.com

3. Breath control is needed to control the use of breath combined with mouth movements in producing speech, and those with speech and communication difficulties may have poor control of the muscles used for speech. Breath control can be improved through blowing games such as blowing on the hair or the skin, blowing bubbles in the water or on the hair.

Photo by anitapeppers at Morguefile.com

4. Copying is needed to observe or imitate speech or signs, but some children with communication difficulties may be engrossed in their own world. Copying can be encouraged by playing alongside children and joining in everyday routines, as well as fun and easy activities such as copying funny faces and sounds in the mirror.

Photo by ladyheart at Morguefile.com

5. Turn taking is needed for understanding of the rules of conversational turn taking. If two people talk at once, communication can break down. Games such as rolling balls and wind up toys to and fro can help encourage turn taking as well as everyday turn taking and sharing with siblings.

Photo by gleangenie at Morguefile.com

Over 100 fun and practical activities to encourage pre-verbal skills and early communication can be found in the third edition of the popular resource ‘early Communication Skills’ by Charlotte Lynch and Julia Kidd.

- Charlotte Lynch 

Speechmark author early Communication Skills 3e

Towards a Culture of Communication and Involvement

The commitment of communication partners to communicate with, and involve, people with learning disabilities requires the active promotion of a culture that is positive and empowering. It is also important for communication partners to consider how they view disability because this greatly influences the way in which they support people. The social and medical models of disability demonstrate how disability can be perceived and how society views disabled people. Attitudes and perceptions towards people with learning disabilities can greatly affect the communication opportunities and quality of support provided.

Some of the barriers to communication that might exist in services supporting people with a learning disability include the following:

• Lack of understanding; eg assumptions are made that people cannot communicate.
• Lack of confidence or experience (which may result in a person not engaging with someone who uses alternative methods of communication).
• Lack of guidance and support available to practitioners.
• Lack of training in communication approaches and tools.
• Lack of skills among practitioners and managers.
• Lack of creativity in approaches.
• Poor, or no, support plans which show how a person communicates and how they like people to communicate with them.
• Information not being shared between practitioners, teams and services.
• Lack of communication tools preventing a person from communicating in the way they are used to.
• Limited resources to support communication.
• Assumptions made about what a person cannot participate in, is able or unable to do, about what they like or dislike, and their preferences or opinions.

The above information is an extract from the book ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’.

You can purchase 'Communicate with Me A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’ book with companion online resource and quality assurance frameworks from Speechmark www.speechmark.net , Amazon and all good book retailers.

You can also join the:

•Communicate with Me Communication Partner Development Scheme

•Communicate with Me Internal Quality Assurance Scheme  

 visit www.communicatewithme.com

Main text cited from: 

© Martin Goodwin, Jennie Miller, Cath Edwards (2015) abridged section from ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability. Speechmark Publishing

Communication and Learning Disability

Communication with and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability

Currently, there is a range of support options for people with learning disabilities. Traditionally, the majority of people will receive support from services throughout their lives, to a greater or lesser extent.  These services may include school or college, play and leisure services, residential or short break services, day services or supported employment. People may also be included in community circles of friends and other unpaid natural support. Increasingly, people with learning disabilities access personalised support which they may manage, with varying degrees of help from other people, as well as using a greater range of community settings.

The nature of support provided by each of these options may be different but all communication partners share the same challenge. Because the proportion of people with learning disabilities who experience difficulties in communicating is so high, the challenge is to effectively meet people’s communication needs and involve them in their lives and their communities.

How a person is supported to communicate and be involved in their lives can greatly impact on that person’s quality of life.  It follows, then, that the ability of the communication partner to support effective communication and involvement is central to an improved quality of life

The above information is an extract from the book ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable EffectiveCommunication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’.

You can purchase 'Communicate with Me A Resource toEnable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a LearningDisability’ book with companion online resource and quality assurance frameworks from Speechmark, Amazon and all good book retailers.

You can also join the:

•Communicate with Me Communication Partner Development Scheme

•Communicate with Me Internal Quality Assurance Scheme  

 visit www.communicatewithme.com

Main text cited from: 

© Martin Goodwin, Jennie Miller, Cath Edwards (2015) abridged section from ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability. Speechmark Publishing

A Guide to School Start 2e

The first year of school can be challenging for plenty of children. There are some who need that extra help.

One resource to help in this case is School Start 2e. This practical guide can be used with children who need additional help in developing communication skills during the crucial first year of school.

Successfully trialled over a three-year period, School Start 2e is an invaluable resource for teachers and teaching assistants that encourages good collaborative practice between schools, speech & language therapists, the school's inclusion coordinator and parents.

This early intervention group programme is aimed at enhancing children's language and sound awareness skills during Reception Year in mainstream primary schools

It comes with simple checklists to identify suitable children, contains weekly sessions with 3 activities and handouts, and provides forms for recording outcomes.

One of the materials included in this resource is group sessions for the Language and Sound Awareness programmes. The following video is an example of an assessment for the language group: 

A walk-through the kit used for an assessment:

 Resources for the Sound Awareness Checklist:

Resources for the Language Checklist:

Details of the checklist:

Example of prepared resources for delivery of the groups:

The results over a 3 year pilot provides evidence that the programmes have been successful in the schools that have used it. 

Testimonial for School Start:

Speechmark authors Catherine De La Bedoyere and Catharine Lowry have been Speech & Language therapists for 15 years. Catherine De La Bedoyere also taught postgraduate teachers at Kingston University and currently works at Sussex Community NHS Trust. Catharine Lowry's experience has been within language units, community clinics and special schools for children with MLD and is presently in the mainstream service for Your Healthcare NHS provider in Kingston Upon Thames

Know more or order School Start 2e.

Importance of mental wellbeing among SEN children

Evidence shows that children and young people with SEN can be up to six times more likely than their peers to experience mental health problems.* So, just why is this? Well, firstly, all of the usual issues that can affect any child, will also affect those with SEN. Secondly, children and young people with SEN can often experience lower self-esteem than their peers, be more vulnerable to bullying, have difficulties understanding social situations and making friends, and can feel isolated from their peers, both academically and socially. 

Some may also find that they have less independence than their classmates, or can find it harder to recognise and talk about their emotions. All of these things can in turn increase the risk of mental health issues.

Mental health difficulties in young people with SEN can also often be missed or overlooked.  Sometimes it can be easy to put issues down simply to a child’s SEN (‘Oh, anxiety is just part of his dyslexia’, ‘She’s bound to feel lonely and left out because of her autism’). School staff may also feel that they lack the expertise to help a child with SEN (‘But he has ADHD so will need specialist support. I don’t know how to help him.’), or indeed that they lack the background in mental health to be able to make a difference.

So, what can we do as educators to promote mental health in children and young people with SEN?

1. Promote mental wellbeing strategies – just because a child has SEN does not mean they won’t benefit from the same strategies as others: teaching them to recognise their strengths, to cultivate positive emotions and to understand their emotions. Many will also benefit from improving their problem-solving abilities and self-esteem.
2. Ensure that you know referral procedures in your setting for specialist support for students experiencing more significant difficulties.
3. Try not to make the situation worse. Sometimes it can be easy to have a deficit-based approach to students with SEN, focusing on what they can’t do, or on closing the gap between them and their peers. It is important that we don’t eliminate the ‘fun’ and vocational aspects of the curriculum which these pupils in particular will benefit from, and that we focus on accelerating strengths and increasing enjoyment of school as these things will have a positive knock-on effect on a child’s wellbeing.

From the book: The Sky's the Limit

 - Victoria Honeybourne

Speechmark author The Sky's The Limit

*NASS (2015) Making Sense of Mental Health, online, www.nasschools.org.uk/nass/making-sense- mental-health/

Why meal times should be about communication, not TV!

Eating at a meal table while watching TV is much more common than it used to be. Twenty years or more ago we might have sat down to eat at a table without a TV as often as three times a day. Having a TV present not only restricts conversation around the table but also models to babies and toddlers that it is possible to eat, talk and watch the TV at the same time – something which good communicators might do but not children who still need to learn the vital non-verbal conversational skills that enable us to communicate effectively.

Things have changed so much since the 1980s that meals are now mostly held either in front of the TV on knees or trays, or because of our busy lifestyles, at different times and in different parts of the house while we do other things. 

Let’s just think of how many non-verbal communication skills are developed round a family meal table, a great many of which are to do with learning to recognise the beginning and ending signals for daily activities and to predict what will happen next:

1. A baby sitting on his parent’s knee would see all that was going on at the table, as would a toddler sitting in her high chair
2. She would see the preparation of the meal, telling her food is on its way
3. The laying of the table, telling her food is coming and about how many people are expected
4. Parents calling for other members of the family to come and eat
5. The arrival of the food on plates telling her the food is served and that ‘eating time’ has started
6. They will then eat the food
7. The end of the eating activity will be indicated by empty and messy plates
8. There will be dirty cutlery to confirm this
9. The plates will be removed and taken to the sink or put in the dishwasher
10. The table is then in a state of flux awaiting the arrival of the pudding
11. The child might see the pudding being made ready
12. The pudding arrives on clean plates signalling the the start of the next course
13. People eat it and clear their plates signalling the end of eating
14. The table is cleared and the washing up started (the next activity with beginning and ends)

Why is this important? Because observing and predicting the start and finish of each element of our daily life helps us learn to anticipate what is going to happen next, deal with movement from one activity to another and, communicatively,  identify when words and sentences start and finish. There is much more that happens but I hope this gives an idea of how much can be learned simply by watching at mealtimes. If the TV is there to distract, the child may miss out on all this developmental input.

On top of what she can learn from watching, remember that throughout the meal family or carers will be talking about the food and what has been going on or will happen next – ‘Please pass the salt’, ‘Did you grow the potatoes?’, ‘How many sausages do you want?’, ‘What are we going to do after tea?’ etc – so that young children will listen and watch the signals passing between people telling them how to identify the ends of phrases and when it is their turn to speak, etc. They will also learn different ways of asking and responding to questions, intonation and facial expressions.

For more on all this and what can be done to make sure children don’t miss out on this essential period of development, please see my book, Not Just Talking which talks about this and much more about non-verbal communication development in children from birth until 19 years of age.

- Sioban Boyce
Speechmark author Not Just Talking

A visual thesaurus can make all the difference

The idea for The Blob Visual Emotional Thesaurus came from my experiences teaching writing in the classroom. Like most teachers, the need to encourage children to edit and improve their work is an endless task. Having a pile of thesauruses in the middle of each set of desks is helpful to further enrich children's vocabulary.

This was especially true when it came to developing characters feelings -teachers who encourage children to include this in their stories usually end up getting happy or sad! When I told them to look for alternatives in the thesaurus, they would select the most unusual, because they had no idea what these words meant.

In the Visual Emotional Thesaurus, this has been overcome in two ways. Firstly, every feeling has an image to visualise how a character might feel. When trying to use words outside of their experience, that is essential. Secondly, a visual range of feelings has been developed so that children can select how intensely their character might be feeling.

This book has been developed to empower writers and to reduce the need for teachers to have to intervene during the redrafting process.

The Blobs have been used to illustrate the feelings. They have no gender, age, fashion or colour, enabling all children to read and identify with the feelings. Blobs have been used in all key stages of education, which means that confident infant readers can access these emotional words as well as older children.

- Ian Long

Speechmark illustrator of Blobs

Useful communication guidance for pupils with special needs

Communicate with Me was written in response to a need to improve how the services for people with learning disabilities communicate with, and involve, the people they support.  It was written as a resource to support work practice and a quality assurance tool to support services to integrate these practices into service culture.  Communication is integral to delivering a quality service for people with a learning disability and effective communication enhances the quality of that support.

Communicate with Me is a resource that provides guidance to anyone who supports someone with a learning disability, whether they are a paid practitioner (employed by a service or directly by an individual), a family member, an advocate or another member of that person’s community. 

Communicate with Me is a learning resource designed to further the abilities of all communication partners to both communicate more effectively with people with a learning disability and to support people in a way which enables them to become more involved in their own lives. 

Communicate with Me is designed to support the whole service to consider and develop both how it communicates with, and involves, people with a learning disability in a way which enables change to become embedded in the culture and shared values of that service.

The above is an extract from the book ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’.

You can purchase 'Communicate with Me A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’ book with companion online resource and quality assurance frameworks from Speechmark www.speechmark.net , Amazon and all good book retailers.

You can also join the:

•Communicate with Me Communication Partner Development Scheme

•Communicate with Me Internal Quality Assurance Scheme  

 visit www.communicatewithme.com

Main text cited from: 

© Martin Goodwin, Jennie Miller, Cath Edwards (2015) abridged section from ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability. Speechmark Publishing

The Theory Behind TALKABOUT

TALKABOUT was first developed in the early 1990s when I was working as a speech and language therapist in London, UK. I was particularly interested in social skills but was frustrated by two aspects of my work as a therapist. First, there was nothing in the literature to guide me on where to start intervention following assessment; and second, my experience showed me that I was not always successful in what I was trying to teach and I could not always predict which children were going to improve and which were not. I set about to solve these two problems over a period of four years.

I started my investigations at a college of further education where I was working with 60 students who had a mild to moderate intellectual disability. We assessed all of the young people I was working with using an adapted social skills assessment from the Personal Communication Plan by Alex Hitchings and Robert Spence – now published in Kelly (2000). The students were involved in this assessment which gave us some insight into their own awareness of their difficulties. From these initial results, we grouped students into their main area of need: body language, conversational skills and assertiveness. We evaluated success through retesting on the original assessment and also compared students with poor and good awareness of their needs.

The results were fascinating. They showed that the students who had been working on their conversational skills progressed more if they had good existing non-verbal skills (ie body language), and students who had been working on their assertiveness progressed significantly more if they had good existing non-verbal and verbal skills.

In addition, we found that students who had poor self and other awareness struggled with all aspects of the work. From this, we established a hierarchy which forms the basis of the Talkabout resources.

Over the next four years, we piloted this programme using different client groups and a group of willing therapists from throughout the UK. We all found consistently that the success of intervention increased if non-verbal behaviours were taught before verbal behaviours, and if assertiveness was taught last (Kelly, 1996).

This original hierarchy then formed the basis of the first Talkabout book (Kelly, 1996) but it has been adapted over the years to include self-esteem and friendship skills. The hierarchy now looks as follows.

Using this hierarchical approach, teachers and therapists can start work with the person at a level that is appropriate to that person’s needs. They can then progress up the levels to enable the person to reach their full potential, ensuring that basic skills are taught before the more complex ones. So a student who needs work on all areas of his social skills would start work first on his body language skills and then would progress to working on his paralinguistic skills, then his conversational skills and, finally, his assertiveness skills.

If this student also had poor self-awareness and low self-esteem, he would need to work on this before working on his social skills. And if a student also had difficulties with his friendship skills, he would only work on developing these skills if he had good self-awareness and good nonverbal and verbal skills.

Of course, success is not just about what you teach first; it is also down to how you teach it.

Extract from Talkabout 2e - LOOK INSIDE

Alex Kelly 
Speechmark author of TALKABOUT

Get 20% off when you pre-order today! Hurry though this offer ends on the 30th April, enter code TA20.

What do you think about when you have toothache?

Please consider that question before we move on?

I was in Bradford recently. Facilitating a team of workers who are on the frontline
and facing difficult behaviour and aggression daily. Yet they love the young people they work with.

Those who had been excluded from school, little response, little change and little sign of hope. Still each of the group yearned to be of developmental assistance to them.

I asked them that question:

'When you have toothache, what do you think about?'
No pause.
An immediate answer from one worker
as we all stood in the circle -
"Toothache"
was the answer.

If we have toothache we struggle to concentrate on anything else.
Restless as a wolf - we feel like the cheese is falling off our cracker. Nothing else really matters.

We can see a person's behaviour but we cannot see their experience.
We can be so preoccupied by their behaviour that we don't see
beyond behaviour.

Difficult behaviour can get under our skin.
Feelings rise within us.
As emotionally intelligent as we may be the feelings we have stimulate us, sometimes, to make a regrettable response.

This is applicable in the staff room, the classroom, the team meeting, the prison, the street, the office, at home, and certainly not only when we are transacting with humans with special needs.

The way I work on awareness and skill development is by using Experiential Exercises including Blob Tree Tools.

The objectives are:

•          Become more aware of our own feelings.
•          Becoming more able to get into contact with them.
•          Develop emotional literacy by being able to give each a feeling name.

So there in Bradford we throw the Blob Feelings Ball around the circle.
'Motion changes emotion' I say.

An activity, doing, is the best way to learn - to practise.
So the ball is thrown around the circle, the miss-catching it is part of the-bouncing-around fun as the ball creates smiles as humans live in expectancy as to who will receive the ball next.

The Blob figure nearest your right thumb -
'what does that Blob feel like?' I ask.
I ban the use of 'happy or sad' as all feelings can be tossed in those headings.
So minds are stretched - everyone engaging in the struggle to articulate.
Even seasoned professionals struggle to find the appropriate word.

I often ask more questions as 'right thumbs' develop their literacy.
'Describe a young person you know who feels like that?'

'When one of your youngsters feels like that, what behaviour does it drive?'

When a group is ready - the questions may become deeper and more personal-
'When did you last feel like that?'

Awareness always precedes skill.
By becoming aware of our own emotional literacy, or lack of, we can then be more sensitive to the feelings of others. More importantly, we can begin to see beyond behaviour to be more in touch with a person's toothache.

Next time I will click about working with special needs groups. I want to share some methods of how I engage them with the crisp objective of making available more tools for their life toolbox.

- Pip Wilson
Beautiful Human Person
Speechmark author of Blobs

Look how well they are getting along; but it’s just a box of Lego®!

We all have a building story; the grand design of creating our own miniature house or the momentary glow of success on discovering the extra set of wheels which completes our innovative vehicle design. Sometimes though, the magic of that box of bricks can have the potential for so much more.

Lego® therapy has been around for a while now. Daniel LeGoff and later Dr Gina Gómez de la Cuesta and Simon Baron-Cohen from the Autism Research Centre, Cambridge,  have shown that within a more structured environment, the use of building blocks and sets can be utilised to improve the social and communication skills of young people with Autism. Recently more and more educational, health and social care settings are realising the benefits of this great programme. Just this week, there’s been news of a special school in Blackpool setting up an after school club.

Using it in a number of settings over the years has been interesting and inspiring. Whether as a one-to-one session to teach and build confidence in social communication, or as a whole class tool to encourage speaking and listening in a literacy lesson, this structured use of model building has had the ability to unlock potential in many young people who prefer a more logical approach to collaborative play.

For the ‘logical thinker’, many aspects of social interaction and communication are strange. ‘To hug or not to hug……..’ This is actually the question. Take a moment to consider what the ‘rules’ are around hugging. Do we hug everyone we know? Do we hug all our friends? Do we sometimes hug in certain places but not others? This single area of socially acceptable behaviour presents one with the prospect of crossing a social minefield. It is just one area of social etiquette which, as a ‘social thinker’ we (usually) successfully navigate, managing to avoid any major explosions. The logical ones amongst us, however, find themselves blundering wildly through; desperately attempting to avoid mistimed contact, awkward polite back pats and the painful minutes entangled in the unanticipated, uninvited clutches of a well-meaning associate.

The activities within the book ‘Building Blocks for Communication’ have been developed with the logical thinker in mind, although all thinking types will no doubt benefit. They have been developed and tried and tested through close work in a number of settings with some incredible people. Used in mainstream classes, Nurture Groups, by Family Support Practitioners and parents at home, and also, with careful planning, in social communication intervention groups, these activities have been designed to be adaptable for many ages and abilities.

The training courses running alongside the publication often produce many more ideas for new and innovative activities. So, get your logical thinking caps on, get out that box of bricks and start presenting abstract concepts in a more structured way! 

Amy Eleftheriades, Alpha Inclusion.
Speechmark author of ‘Building Blocks for Communication’