Have you ever worked with a student who needs an AAC, but you don’t know which one would work best for them? If you have, then you’ll appreciate this episode. Annabeth and Mara from The Fanny Pack Therapist have found that their respective therapy styles, as a speech language pathologist and an occupational therapist, mesh so well that they teamed up to help more students.

Annabeth and Mara love how AACs empower students to find ways to communicate their thoughts and needs with the people around them. They’ve found that AACs don’t prohibit verbal speech, but simply give a child a way to communicate while they work toward verbal speech. You don’t want to miss their ABCs of AACs on their Instagram page from October 2020.

By collaborating together, SLPs and OTs can get a more holistic view of a child. While the SLP is evaluating a child’s expressive and receptive skills, an OT can come in and see where a child’s fine motor skills are. And once they’ve passed the initial evaluation, together, the SLP and OT can try signs, low-tech options, verbal speech, and just about anything else to see what works.

I hope this episode gets your wheels turning on how you can work with other professionals or how you can help your students or clients use AACs to meet their therapy goals. Make sure you check out The Fanny Pack Therapist for more ideas on collaborating with other therapists.

What's Inside:

• Listen to how Annabeth and Mara collaborate in the age of COVID.
• The importance of shared goals with other intervention specialists, and what that can look like for your students.
• Communication is a basic right, and an AAC gives a student a chance to communicate.
• How can someone improve their competency in the AAC world if they don’t have any previous experience?