The school summer holidays present a wealth of options for exercise for both parents and children. Thanks to the drier weather and no school time constraints families, toddlers, teens and people of all ages can bike, play ball or swim together to their heart’s content. Summer is also the perfect time to tweak and train language skills too, particularly for children who have complex communication aids.

Exercise Your Vocabulary

Using a communication aid can be challenging so by taking time to practice forming sentences and reacting to the questions, users will be able to speed up their talk time and expand their vocabulary. Of course, the easy way to do this is by engaging in lengthy conversations and asking questions to a communication aid user regularly, but there are also built-in programmes to most communication aids that can help with the process. Playing word games, engaging with apps or even just practising message banking can help expand the communication capabilities of a device user.

Grow Your Grid Size

One of the simplest ways to work on communication skills with a communication aid is to increase the grid size. With most devices being able to accommodate up to 80 buttons, consider upgrading to a slightly larger grid with more word selections available. Over the summer holidays is a great time to implement this change as users will have more time to adjust and practice without the pressure of a school environment. Upgrading the grid size in small increments is recommended as this is most representative of how natural language progresses.

Read to Succeed

Reading as well as communicating verbally plays a huge part in language acquisition so downloading a book onto a communication aid will help users to exercise their skills. If a person is unable to read by themselves, reading to them will still have a positive effect on language as they will absorb the words that are being said to them, so set some time aside to read to them, a little each day.