New AAC Boards Coming to Oneida Elementary Playgrounds

Helping Every Student Find Their Voice: New AAC Boards Coming to Oneida Elementary Playgrounds

Playgrounds are full of conversations. Students decide what to play, take turns, laugh with friends, and share what they see around them. But for children who are non-speaking or have limited speech, joining those conversations can look a little different.

Thanks to the Oneida Owls Club, all three Oneida CSD elementary playgrounds will soon have another way to connect with their classmates. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) boards will give students a visual way to express themselves, helping make playground play more inclusive for everyone.

The boards were designed by Leslie Stockman, a speech-language pathologist at Willard Prior Elementary. It is a project Leslie and her team have wanted to bring to life for several years, and she is thankful for the support from the Oneida Owls Club and our three elementary principals for helping make this project a reality.

“Bringing this resource to Willard Prior is just one way we are building inclusion and showing our non-speaking and limited speaking students that they belong here.”

Communication Beyond the Classroom

AAC helps make language visible through symbols, pictures, and text that represent spoken words. For students who use these tools to communicate, having them available outside of therapy and the classroom is just as important as having them during lessons.

“AAC can't stop at the classroom door. If a child learning AAC only saw their symbols modeled twice a week for 20-30 minutes during therapy, it would take approximately 84 years for them to receive the language exposure of a typically developing 18-month-old.”

The playground is a natural place for students to practice communicating. Whether they are choosing a game, asking a friend to take a turn, or talking about something happening around them, there are opportunities to use language throughout play.

The new boards are designed to support those everyday conversations, not just requests.

“As adults, we often get stuck using AAC only for requesting. But it has to be so much more than that. Our new playground communication boards include social phrases like "my turn/your turn", labeling actions, and commenting on the environment. The layout of the board and the color coding of the symbols is aligned with the way vocabulary is organized across different AAC apps to make it more familiar to our AAC users.”

By bringing communication boards onto the playgrounds, students will have more chances to use language in the moment, alongside their friends. And because the boards will be in a shared space, all students can explore how communication works in different ways.

A Team Effort to Support Students

The playground boards are just one part of the work Leslie and her colleagues do to help students communicate and participate in school. At Willard Prior, the speech-language team works with students on a variety of skills and functional communication.

“I love being a speech-language pathologist, especially at Willard Prior where we have a wonderful therapy team. We work with students on articulation, receptive and expressive language, stuttering, social skills, and functional communication.”

Much of that work happens behind the scenes too. Leslie and her colleagues work with families and companies to obtain AAC devices, create visual supports, and collaborate with teachers so students can use their skills throughout the day.

“It is our hope that having these communication boards available at all three elementary playgrounds will foster an inclusive, language-rich environment. It is also a small way that we can build continuity to help our non-speaking students with the transition between grade-level buildings.”

Learning to Understand One Another

The boards will support students who use AAC, but they will also create an opportunity for classmates to learn something important: people communicate in different ways, and every way deserves to be understood.

“For all of our students, we are working on developing empathy. The more exposure our typically developing students have to AAC in the younger grades, the more understanding and accepting they will be as our students grow up together.”

Thank you, Leslie and Team (Pictured: Leslie and Rachel), Oneida CSD Principals, and Oneida Owls Club.