Ming from Agents of Speech shares how to teach a nonverbal child to imitate by starting with simple gestures instead of forcing words. Use structured play, mouth shapes, and cue cards to scaffold the learning.
So you might be saying, ming, my child isn't even at this level, so what do I do if she doesn't say a word? And we started off with this child at nonverbal level. What worked for us was instead of trying to go for the word, every time we put it, we would do a gesture instead. Instead, we go put. We just wanted the child to do a gesture. That's all we wanted. So whenever we teach her, she would do the gesture. So onto the next thing that we're going to talk about is have some structured play. What else can we use to shoot for some sort of imitation or get the child to repeat after us? Now, we can use some cues and prompts like we just said. We could use mouth shapes. We use cue cards.
