Ming (Agents of Speech) explains a simple, therapist-tested method to teach a non-verbal child the 'open' gesture. Rather than repeating verbal commands, he recommends physically guiding the child's hand to perform the gesture repeatedly (quality repetition) until the child performs it independently—practiced consistently (e.g., across a week) to ensure many successful trials.
When you are giving a lot of repetition for the child, telling them what to do, cut it now. How many times does your child actually do what you say? One to one, immediately? A simple shift will make sense if you want your child to do, for instance, a simple gesture is that we do open, right? Open. I learned this my first job as a speech therapist, and I'm just passing it on. We just want the child to do like the open gesture, that's all. How do we do that? We take the child's hand and we go open like that. We literally take the child's hand and we do it right. We do that for the whole week until the child just does it on their own. So the reason why is because if you want consistency, you need this quality repetition. You need for the child to do it successfully many, many, many times.
