Katie from The Autism Helper shows how to build communication practice into school job tasks for students using AAC devices. Each vocational page includes job-specific phrases for greeting, taking direction, asking for help, and saying goodbye. Students practice real interactions while completing tasks like cleaning, recycling, or shredding, building soft skills for future employment.
Hi guys, it's Katie from The Autism Helper. I wanted to show you how we facilitate communication skills while we're working on our in-school jobs, and I specifically wanted to highlight what this looks like for our learners with, um, who utilize AAC. So for all our students who have devices, we have a page on everyone's device. It may be located in a different spot on everyone's device depending on their level of independence of using the device, but everyone has these vocational phrases. And they're tailored for the jobs that our students are currently working on in school. And this helps kind of streamline everything for our students. And there's also an expectation that we have when we set up the jobs that our students are not just going to come in and clean the space and then leave. We have an expectation that we're going to work on these important soft skills like saying hello, taking direction, asking for help, saying goodbye. And it's such an important part of our students' learning to get that interaction with a variety of people during their day. So this is one of the ways that we set up that structure. So again, everyone has a page on their device like this, and I'm just going to show you some of the phrases that we've loaded in, um, you know, for all of our different jobs. For example, we have our library job where there may be different tasks like dusting computers or shelves or cleaning the tables. We also do recycling where our students go around and ask different teachers if they can take their recycling. They also might frequently need help with that lid because it's pretty, it can be pretty heavy. Then we also do shredding, for example, so things like letting the person know you're going to be taking their shredding, asking for help using the plug, turning it on, things like that. So I'm just going to highlight a few for you.
I'm here to clean the library. Hello, can I take your recycling? Hello.
I accidentally pressed that one twice. But that's like a nice way when we do our greeting for our recycling job. And then, you know, the person— when our students are making these communication initiations, then the person has to give a response back. So there may be a time where the person says, I don't have any recycling, and then that's okay. Our student's going to have to take in that information and move along. Let me just show you shredding.
I will shred paper today.
Right. So again, our student, the expectation is they're not just going to come in and shred. They're going to use this opportunity to practice their communication skills. And we have had great success with this, and we continue to look for ways to embed practicing soft skills, especially communication, throughout our jobs for our students because we find that it is so important for them to practice as much as they can before they go out and get jobs in the community. Hope that was helpful.
