Assistive Technology Project for Education

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Teletherapy Activity Ideas for Clients who use AAC

Vicki Haddix

Transitioning therapy materials to teletherapy can be a daunting task. We want to provide as much assistance as possible to make your therapy sessions run a little smoother. In order to do that we have provided some free activities that we found to be useful during teletherapy sessions. 

During the activities, we usually split the computer screen with the communication board or video on one side and the activity on the other side. 

Activities

  • Tarheel Reader is a website that includes hundreds of books that cover a wide variety of topics. The really great thing about this website is that it has AAC symbols at the bottom of the screen that can be used for modeling during teletherapy! (https://shared.tarheelreader.org)

  • Chrome Music Lab is a free google product that allows users to experiment with sounds and create songs. It includes several activities, but we have gotten the most use out of the songmaker activity. (https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com)

  • Groove Pizza is a musical application like Chrome Music Lab. Using Groove Pizza, you could model symbols such as more, go, stop, fast and slow. (https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza)

  • Online coloring pages can also be useful and engaging in teletherapy! We use them to model different colors and carrier phrases such as “I want” and “I put” (https://www.online-coloring.com)

  • Puzzles are a great way to model language via teletherapy as well. Here is a website where you can find several premade puzzles or you can make your own. You can also adjust the amount of pieces for any of the puzzles on the website. (https://www.jigsawplanet.com) 

  • Toy Theater also has a building activity where you can add blocks to a grid to create different structures. You could use this activity to model several different symbols (https://toytheater.com/build/)

  • You can create your own activities on Jamboard. Because Jamboard is a whiteboard, you can use it to create virtually any activity. We used it to create a literacy activity and a writing/sequencing activity. You can access these activities by clicking on the links below. Please remember to copy the Jamboards before you make edits to them, as they are example slides for everyone to use.

  • Youtube videos can also act as fun activities to use while modeling AAC. Below, I have listed a few youtube channels that we have found to be useful in teletherapy sessions.