Ming from Agents of Speech shows how to teach kids new ways to communicate by exposing them to multiple contexts, like watching a caregiver make coffee. She uses everyday routines to draw out communicative acts like tapping, pointing, and vocalizing, then expands those skills into real-life activities with incremental prompting.
Teaching new language functions is all about horizontal. It's very easy for them to generalize and learn more because they understand more contexts and they can go furthermore. Right? Let me give you an example. Some children, they need to learn nurture with play and nurture interest. It doesn't need to be play only. It could be that your child loves watching you make coffee. Therefore, you start to teach them to use some language functions during of that and might not be even using speech, right? Right. So if they want you to continue with the next step, they might tap you, they might signal you with a point, they might tell you with a sound or whatever to do the next step. Right. Or that you do something wrong during the step and they have to correct you. Maybe with speech, maybe with the gesture. It's like, no, that's wrong. Use that one instead. Right. You might be putting the coffee beans and the wrong thing and they're like, ah, what's going on? Right. So they have to tell you what to do in order to continue watching you making that coffee.
