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Velcro Board:
Making a Velcro board is a good idea to teach object recognition, which is another precursor to speech. We purchased a small white board that can be written on with markers on one side, and the other side is made of cork board. We fixed about 12 permanant velcro dots to the board (on the cork side) to make our learning board. Using Boardmaker (or you can also cut out pictures or take photos and print them) we created 12 items that we wanted to teach the boys. The items can really be anything, but we wanted them to be things that the boys would see in day to day living. We chose things like: shoes, fork, bed, hat, bag, apple, balloon, etc… Be sure to laminate your pictures so they cannot be ripped or chewed on! You can use our idea and purchase inexpensive clear shelf paper to laminate them yourself. We have also paid more money and purchased real “self-laminating” paper, and much to our chagrin it did not work nearly as well.

Start only with a field of 2 to 3 objects on your board to lessen distractions. Stick the pictures (they need to have the other half of the Velcro dots on the back of them) on your board. Ask your child to “give me the hat” and see if he knows what a “hat” is. If not, then decrease your field to only 2 items on the board at a time until he has more object recognition under his belt. Initially, you may need to show him what the hat is by pulling it off of the board and handing it to him. He can then place it in a Ziploc bag or just hand it back to you, whatever you think is best.

You can do this activity until your child is so adept at it that he can select the correct object from a field of 12 items on the board. Once he has mastered that, you will want to start printing more pictures and adding one or two new ones at a time. He should be able to handle a larger field since he will already know what most of the pictures are. If 12 pictures does become too distracting, just drop it back down to 6 or 8 or whatever he can handle. Have fun with this and be creative thinking of new objects to teach.