About this activity
Fourteen two-symbol messages for an AAC user moving from single hits to combinations: want + juice, go + outside, eat + apple, more + music, help + me, stop + car, open + door. The pairings are deliberately ordinary — these are the messages a five-year-old actually needs across a school day, not a vocabulary list built to look impressive on a board.
How to use it in a session
Model before you expect. Say and hit both symbols yourself several times in the natural context before you ever put the card up as a demand. When you do run the cards, accept the second symbol as success even if the first is missing — put + in is a win when the child was hitting only put last week. Pair each card with the real object where you can: open + door works better standing at a door. Ten minutes is plenty, and a session that gets through six cards with real modeling beats one that races all fourteen.
What to listen for
Watch the order. A child who hits juice + want has the combination and not yet the sequence, and that is a different target from a child who hits only juice. Notice which verbs generalize: want and more usually come first and stick, while stop and put arrive later. The moment worth recording is an untaught combination — a child who produces eat + cookie from this set has generalized rather than memorized.
Carrying it home
The strongest thing a family can do is model on the device without asking for anything back. Hit go + outside as you open the door, eat + apple as you hand one over, and then say nothing. Twenty models a day with no demand attached builds the map faster than any drill.
Questions
- Does this replace the student's own device?
- No. It is practice material for the combinations, not a communication system. Run it alongside the device the student actually uses so the symbols and the motor plan stay the same.
- What if my student only hits one symbol?
- That is the expected starting point. Model the pair and accept the single hit, then expand it aloud — the child hits juice, you hit want + juice and say it. Expansion is the mechanism here.
- Is it free?
- Yes, the board plays in full with no account. Signing in adds goal tracking and homework assignment, nothing else.