Snapshot
PECS
October 2016 Presentation:
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to not be able to communicate your basic needs and wants with others? Children whom are non-verbal and/or who have severe speech sound production impairments live the answer to this question on a daily basis. It’s like walking around with duct tape over your mouth. Lack of ability to communicate causes frustration levels to increase drastically and students will often act out negatively, shut down, and get left behind in the learning process. I would like to change this by implementing the Picture Exchange Communication System with these non-verbal and severely speech impaired students to help them find their voice. Ultimately, we would like to see all of the children become verbal. With PECS, mostly 80% of children do become verbal. This is not always possible, but functional communication is.
Using PECS will help our students with disabilities develop an understanding of the language process and an effective and functional means of communication with peers, teachers, and family. The PECS pictures can be used in all classrooms as well to create daily schedules so that all students become visually aware of their schedule without having to ask the teacher multiple times throughout the day. Pre- and post-surveys will be completed by teachers and parents for the students involved in this study. Students who move through the four phases of PECS may want to continue using this system, or they may then choose to move on to a communication device or a more compact system such as an iPad with a communication app. After using this PECS system, they will now have the language knowledge, ability to discriminate between pictures and put words into sentence form as a means of functional and effective communication.