Communicating Partners
Dr. James D. MacDonald's Website
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Environmental Barriers
Your child's communication will change in different environments. As people, activities and stimulation changes around your child so will his communication. Many children communicate more often and more easily in some situations and rarely or with difficulty in others. When your child is learning to communicate, you can help him do so by ensuring that he spends considerable time in environments that make communicating easy and enjoyable.
COMMON ENVIRONMENTAL BARRIERS TO COMMUNICATION
Use this scale to discover what might interfere with your child's natural learning to communicate. Then, start making changes in the ones you can most easily change. The goal is to make your environment more actively allow and help your child interact first, then communicate.
- ____Partners act in ways the child cannot try to do
- ____Partners talk in ways the child cannot try to do
- ____Child spends little one on one time with people
- ____His living environment is noisy
- ____His visual environment is distracting
- ____He has few boundaries to limit his behavior
- ____His peers are overwhelming
- ____His environment allows few successes
- ____He has little access to quiet time
- ____People rarely enter into the child's choice and style of play
- ____Interactions with people are very brief
- ____His environment discourages communication
- ____His environment encourages more solo than social behavior
- ____Teaching focuses more on performance than conversation
- ____His environment encourages passive behavior
- ____His environment offers too many choices
- ____ He is not allowed enough time at an activity
- ____ He is expected to do things on his own without modeling
- ____He is regularly corrected and criticized
- ____He is regularly pressured to do difficult things.
What barriers will you start changing to help your child communicate?
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