Can Your AAC Users Join in on Talk Like a Pirate Day? Try this!

I’ve joined up with Sweet Southern Speech and other SLPs (speech-language pathologists) for a linky party for Pirate Day fun. If you read this post all the way to the bottom, you will find links to more blogs with fun ideas and resources that are pirate themed.

“Talk Like a Pirate Day” just keeps growing in popularity.  I have friends who are way into the whole anachronistic experience, including a couple who fence.  Kids, especially, love the opportunity to be silly and the excuse to act like the ‘bad guys’ for a while.

But how do your non-speaking kids take part?  Does this become just another experience that they observe but can’t join?   

Not if they have a speech generating device and 10 minutes of your time.  Don’t have 10 minutes to spare for programming?  Then give them this communication board to use.  If you and other students provide Aided Input and reciprocal vocalization, everyone can sound like a pirate!

If you’re looking for pirate-themed resources for your therapy session, you might like my companion resource for “There Was an Old Pirate Who Swallowed a Fish”  

This is another story where sequencing skills take center stage; similar to the “I Know an Old Lady Who…” series.  This time, it’s a pirate who swallows all sorts of pirate-y things, until he gets so big that he sinks.

My favorite activity is the pirate game, where students roll a single die that has symbols for 6 of the items in the story.  

They collect pirate-like ‘gold pieces’ until someone gets all the pieces and has to put them in order to re-tell the story.  

I have students play until everyone has all the pieces.  

This gives every student the opportunity to sequence the pictures and/or tell or summarize the story.

I spend a lot of time working on building narrative skills with students, so that they can build their skills in relating experiences, having conversations, and retelling stories.  Those skills are crucial for both social and academic success.

The resource also contains activities for describing, building vocabulary, labeling parts of a whole, and phonological awareness (including alphabetizing, recognizing and using rhyme, identifying the initial or final sounds in words and counting syllables in words and words in sentences).

Here is the die, which you can use to have students retell the story or repeat the line that goes with the item they land on.

Avast ye (Stop right there) and Keep on Talking!