Let's Have a Conversation!

In my social language group with my students with ASD, it was clear that we needed to work on some conversation skills.  The school social worker and I work together once a week and run these groups- you will hear more about these groups next week in a guest post at Simply Speech.  We have worked a lot on greetings, sharing, playing games, etc., and we wanted to find a way to work on conversation.  We decided to do this with talking about our favorite things.  I made a visual activity that focuses on animals, toys, colors, and foods. 

When we first tried this, I went first to start things rolling.  I asked a student what their favorite color was and then gave the visual supports so that he could answer.

After the student answered, a silent prompter pointed to the visual cue with the question "Mrs. Shamberger, what is your favorite color?"  The student then asked me the question.

We had to work a lot on the students looking toward each other when they asked and answered the questions.  Since we started working on this about a month and a half ago, we have started to take the visuals away.  The students are now looking at each other, using their names to get attention, and then asking questions without the visuals!  It has been a great activity to use with our students with ASD that are in self-contained classrooms.