It's October - and October is AAC Awareness Month. Each year for AAC Awareness Month, lots of people around the world run AAC Awareness events aimed at raising the profile of AAC in their community. The hashtag for this year is #AACaware21 - check it out on social media!
I'm very lucky this year to be doing a series of AAC Awareness Events with Bullimbal School in Tamworth and with speech pathologist extraordinaire Helen Tainsh. The school's theme for #AACaware21 is "AAC is magic".
Each week, an AAC Awareness Event is planned on Zoom. This will be happening after school each time so that the wider Bullimbal community can join in.
Each activity is designed to go along with the theme of "AAC is Magic". This week, the planned activity is a shared reading of the book of the same name, that Helen and I wrote for the session. You can check out the book below - and feel free to download it as well 🙂
I wasn't able to attend this week, but Tanya, the assistant principal, read the book while Helen modelled using AAC, and everyone who attended had invitations to participate in the shared reading.
We deliberately wrote the book with some pages which are aimed at creating some "concrete magic" - like getting people to stand up - and pages aimed more at generating conversations around topics like "the things we love".
I'm looking forward to actually being present at next week's session - and to enjoying some AAC magic! And I'd love to hear what you are doing for AAC Awareness Month as well.
Armen M Gulian
jane