Tulare SELPA - Autism Resources

Developing Communication

Building Sentences

For children with autism spectrum disorder who are ready to begin constructing 2 and 3 word sentences (especially for those who have been using PECS or a similar visual support to promote the growth of receptive and expressive communication), it may be helpful to begin using “sentence strips”, “sentence templates” or “sentence boards”. To assist the child’s expressive communication these sentence strips can have a color-coded border that corresponds with a color-coded border that can be added to the child’s current collection of picture symbols. To maximize the resources that may already be available to you and your team, it will be helpful to find out if others that you will be working with have already adopted a color-coding system. If not, it will be beneficial to agree upon a system so that you can maximize your Team’s efforts, share resources, and provide consistency within your program. We found that our TEAM was willing to agree to use the following color-coding:

Referred to as an Agent (e.g., subjects such as: I, Mom, Dad, Jamie, Brad, etc.)

Referred as an Action (e.g., verbs such as: eat, drink, play, read, watch, etc.)

Referred to as an Object (e.g., objects such as: apple, block, tree, sand, milk, etc.)

Referred to as a Modifier (e.g., adjectives, prepositions, locations, and words that qualify the sense of another word or word group, such as: on, up, down, in, happy, sad, mad, etc.)

Referred to as a Grammatical Structure (e.g., are, is, -ing, etc.)

View some Sentence examples.

References:

1. Augmentative Communication News, November 2003, Vol. 15, #4, AAC and Autism. In collaboration with Emily Rubin, Pat Mirenda and Howard Shane, this issue investigates what is currently known about ASD and how AAC approaches serve this population.

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