Are Picture Symbols Just for Special Ed?

A snippet of a storyboard with an I see symbol strip

No. There may still be a stigma against any form of communication outside of verbal communication, but picture symbols are by no means only for those who are non-verbal or those functioning at a cognitively younger level versus their chronological ages. I am not PECS trained. So the way I use picture symbols is different. To give a bit of background, I worked for the NYC Board of Education District 75, which is the special education district. So, yes picture symbols were all around the classrooms. Especially those that followed the TEACCH Method. TEACCH stands for " Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children". I am not TEACCH trained either, this is a method employed by some special education classroom teachers. I did use picture symbols to work on building utterance length, create visual supports to adapt activities, create schedules, etc. At the same time I started working as an Early Intervention home based therapist after school for extra income. I worked with toddlers with speech and language delays, CAS or childhood apraxia of speech, and severe phonological process, all who were cognitively functioning at age appropriate levels, but had communication difficulties. I started using visuals with them, just as I had been in the classrooms of the district 75 school I worked in. Their frustration decreased, and their willingness to participate in tasks increased because even though I was challenging them to verbalize with the picture symbols, they knew they had a backup communication system in place, that I and their family acknowledged and accepted.

How can you use pictures as a bridge to independent communication. If tasks are hard and at the end of it they still feel like they aren't able to get their point across, they can begin to shut down, and some may get so frustrated they scream, throw themselves on the floor etc. How can picture symbols make a difference? Use them to increase receptive vocabulary. How? Let's say you're reading to your child, who has demonstrated some difficulty with learning new words. First, take the vocabulary from the book you are working on. Nouns, adjectives, or verbs? Then create a board with pictures of those words. It can be as simple or as complex as your child needs it to be. Follow the directions in a previous blog to diy an activity board- Making Communication Boards on PowerPoint. As long as you're not selling, or putting the board on display for others, you can take pictures of the illustrations in the book and import it into your board so you can give your child an exact reference to point to identify. You can use " Show me___", "Where is___" and "Is this___" to work on identifying by pointing to the visual representation when provided with the verbal label or building their receptive vocabulary (what they understand).

You can also use the board you've created to help your child develop their expressive vocabulary and utterance length. Their expressive vocabulary is what they verbally produce (Dixon, 2024). You can do this with a sentence strip and by creating picture symbols they can lift up off the board, place on the strip, and point to each picture, and verbally state what each represents so that they are learning how to respond to a what question with a specific phrase, instead of simple 1 word noun labels. For example, you ask " What do you see?" and have them point to "I see" and say "I see", then have them point to the word " blue" and verbally say " blue", and finally have them point to " pillow and blanket" and have them say " pillow and blanket' to create the entire utterance which would be " I see blue pillow and blanket". This works for a child who can verbalize those words but is stuck on one word responses to wh questions. It can also work for a child who is just beginning to imitate. In this case initially you would provide the entire utterance for them to imitate. Once you have done this a few times, try pulling your models back and only provide part of the word for them to pick up where you left off. eventually you want to get to the point where you only need to point to the word for them to say it on their own. I use these sentence strips with children who have echolalia as well. We start of modeling since they will imitate verbatim, and gradually pull away verbal prompts until they are pointing to and creating the utterance on thier own. I have also used this strategy with children who are on the spectrum and have hyperlexia. They can read, but they don't always understand what they are reading. In other words they are exceptional at decoding letters and words, but comprehension is low. Here the benefit of pictures is that you are consistently pairing the words they decode with ease to their visual representations. For a child that has CAS, you can use picture symbols as a reference while working with a therapist to improve the sequence of movements for accurate and consistent verbal productions, regardless of the level ( phonemic, partial word, or whole word) they are at. In the home, it may look like a breakfast board, a bedtime board, etc. Essentially, vocabulary associated with their daily routines.

Watch the video below to get a better idea of how to use picture symbols to adapt books and the second video to learn how to use a color board to adapt arts &crafts and play activities. You can adapt any activity, arts& crafts, cooking, shared reading, play doh, mealtime, you name it. It's about providing the supports they need to improve comprehension and use of language.

Find the free color board and other visuals and worksheets here: https://www.funspeechpath.com/social-skills-pediatric

Find the books mentioned in the video below here: https://www.funspeechpath.com/books-products

References:

DIXON, C., HESSEL, A., SMITH, N., NIELSEN, D., WESIERSKA, M., & OXLEY, E. (2023). Receptive and expressive vocabulary development in children learning English as an additional language: Converging evidence from multiple datasets. Journal of Child Language, 50(3), 610–631. doi:10.1017/S0305000922000071