The Therapies Team are excited to share the success of our three-part AAC Parent Training recently delivered at Sherwood Park School – Sherwood Hill Campus. AAC is an approach to communication that helps people to communicate or to communicate more clearly and easily (source Augmentative and alternative communication | RCSLT).
‘Augmentative’ means that it helps to make communication clearer. This may be by helping people make their speech clearer or it may be by helping them to communicate something that a person is trying to say using things like body language or facial expressions.
‘Alternative’ means a different way to communicate. This may be instead of speech or it may replace some behaviours for some users.
The trainings have been planned, organised and delivered by our Speech and Language Therapy team based at Sherwood Hill Campus including; Tessa O’Brien, Mikayla Colley and Aleisha Teske. These sessions have offered practical strategies to support our parents to understand, and use AAC with their children in the home. This included providing information on being a good communication partner and how to model using AAC. We watched practical video examples, and even had parents bring their own videos from home that we watched together and then gave helpful and supportive advice.
The feedback from families following the training has been very positive! Parents shared that they felt the information and strategies were clear and relevant, and everyone felt more confident in being able to use AAC in the home with their child.
Below are some lovely quotes from our feedback forms:
It’s very useful for us and very friendly and helpful trainers
In response to being asked what was most useful about the training, one response stated:
Viewing videos of children using AAC and engaging them.
We would like to thank all of the parents for their time, effort and commitment in attending the trainings. We hope that these training sessions have helped to equip them with the tools and strategies that they need to support their child in their communication journey.
We look forward to offering more training in the future.
