Why Flashcards Won’t Work on Non Verbal Children

Stop buying flashcards. I really mean it. So if your child is a non verbal child, I don't want you to buy flashcards anymore. And if you go to Amazon, you go to Shopee, you go to, you know, Tokopedia, wherever you're living in the world, okay? I don't know what, what type of online stores you guys have. If you try type in like speech or like learn how to talk, the first few things of course is going to be flashcards, right? And then it's going to be books or whatever. But the problem is, the problem is a few things. Number one is it's the same as learning from the iPad, right? It's a one way communication. You're teaching only one language function and that is to label things that are on the car 2D and not even in real life. So if your child is non verbal, the conceptual level is that you go from a real object, 3D towards a toy like object that represents that thing. And then one more level is like a real life picture, 2D, you know, snap it with the iPhone, print it out, and then after that it's like a realistic picture and after that it's line drawing and after that as symbols like words or whatever. So the complexity goes like that, right? So if you're skipping from like the real object towards a 2D, the child will learn the 2D object as the word. And therefore when they see the real object, all they know how to do is to label it and not to use it in the correct way. Okay? So the second thing is there's no context to use the words. Let's say I learn a bunch of words and you've learned a bunch of words in your life for a foreign language, right? And let me ask you, wow, can you speak that language fluently? Like for me, I, I learned French for, I don't know, God knows, like three years during middle school, right? And I've also learned French during my preschool years. Apparently I was pretty fluent when I was like two or three. Crazy, right? But when I got to middle school, I forgot all of it. And all I remember now is how to say I go fishing and I, I ride a bicycle and I go to the library. That's all. So the reason why is because there's no context to use words if you're using flashcards when you're teaching languages must be context based because the problem in children who are delayed is that they don't have a problem in vocabulary. They really have a problem in language use and language acquisition. So if you're teaching them through flashcards, you can do this for non delayed children. It will increase their vocab by a lot. And if you've already taught the language functions that you want the child to know the. Then of course you can use flashcards, but not at the point where they are nonverbal. Okay? Okay. The third point is most words on flashcards are nouns. Nouns are not good for communicating, right? What's the point of knowing all the words, the nouns of everything here? I can just point it out. I can say, I want that one and that's it, right? You've been to a foreign country, I want this. That's it. And, and, and how much? Pretty much. That's all you need to know, right? So nouns are not very communicative. The most communicative words in the world are actually verbs and adjectives, right? So if someone asks you, what do you want to do? I want to leave, I want to eat, I want to, whatever those are verbs, those are very, those are much more communicative than if you say what do you want to do? And you say like, you can say cookie or like chicken, and then it could go either way. You can eat a chicken, you could farm a chicken, you can like, I don't know, see chicken in the, in the zoo, if there are any. So it doesn't make sense, right? So the words you teach your children must be play based and verb related. Okay? So last thing I want to talk about, which I've alluded already, non verbal children have a language use and language acquisition problem, not a vocab problem. What does that mean? If a child has a vocab problem, then using logic, right? The child who knows all the words, all the nouns, all the names of planets, animals, colors, numbers, they shouldn't have a problem with communication, right? The reason why they still do is because they have a language use problem, because they, they've skewed the vocab towards one part of the whole language that is not even functional. So therefore you, what you got to do now is to teach in a way that helps them to acquire those verbs, those other words that we actually use in real life. So how do we do it? Through play. So if you want to know more how to do play, there are many videos that I talk about here on the channel. You can go ahead and watch those. Okay, Right away you can go and watch it and see how you can teach your child to start playing and learning and talking at the same time. Okay? And that's pretty much it. For this video. I'm trying to keep my videos shorter nowadays. If you want to, Please go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to grab a list of tools and toys that we recommend you to get. Okay, that's it for today. I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye. Bye.