Gina from The Autism Helper shows how to build a core communication board in Boardmaker using the Modified Fitzgerald color system: yellow for pronouns, green for verbs, blue for adjectives, purple for prepositions. She explains sizing options like 2-inch buttons for 20 cells and why keeping symbols in fixed locations helps with motor planning.
Hi everyone, it's Gina from The Autism Helper. I'm here today to show you how to make a core board for your classroom or for your kids at home if you service them. So basically what you want to do is just start with a blank page and then make your buttons. You go to button. I'm using Boardmaker. You can use SymbolStix or whatever symbol program your school is using. And I like to make them about 2 inches, but again, it depends on how many cells that you want on your board. So this is a 20-cell board, so they're able to be 2 inches wide. If you're going to do something bigger like a 57-cell board, then obviously the squares are going to have to be a little bit smaller unless you blow it up. So what I'm doing here is I'm just putting in the most commonly used pronouns. This is like a medium-sized board, that's why there's only 20 cells on it. And so I do the pronouns over to the left, and then I like to do verbs kind of next there. So I like to use "want," and I'm just typing in the word and hitting enter, and it populates it for me. And the main thing is that you want to keep the symbols consistent, okay? So if this is the one you use for "I," I would want to use this all the time. And then you can continue on with this, um, the verbs and pronouns, whatever you're— whatever you want on your board. In order to make the colors, the color coding system does depend on which one you're using. There's a couple schools of thought. Um, this one's the Modified Fitzgerald Key. It's just one main color coding symbols by like grammatical categories or like the parts of speech. So the pronouns are going to be yellow, the verbs are going to be green, blue can be adjectives, and purple can be prepositions. Um, so "want" is going to be a green square. So I just click on it and then I go over here to the fill and I find the green. And then hit OK. And so on. Find the gradient or the fill color and green. And then so on and so on. So you just want to think about how you would be actually making the sentences. I want blah blah blah go here. Um, you can also put in, um, some prepositions. I like to kind of put them over here. It depends on how many words and what words you want to include on your board. So I like this "out" one. You can do, say, "on" and so on. So you just want to fill your board with the words that you want to work on with your student. The main thing is, is that you want to keep them in the same spot no matter if you expand this board or not. That way that motor planning is still there and they don't have to continually search for the symbol. Like, we don't want to put "I" here all the time and then switch up the word and put the "I" down here, if that makes sense. So this is how you make a core board, and on my next, um, tutorial, I'll show you how to make a fringe board.
