As told by Mom and Therapist Sabrina Lu Ekanayake, M.Ed., C-SLDS

My 17-year-old nonverbal son EJ knows his words matter. While learning to use LAMP Words for Life, he’s discovered that movement matters, too. Movement helps him understand new words and communicate with people around him. And even our approach in giving him access to various modes of communication involves movement across multiple speech-generating devices. Let me share a bit about what we’ve learned in this journey.  

We first discovered LAMP during EJ’s initial assessment at school. EJ briefly used LAMP at age 7 before switching to TouchChat for many years, and returned to the iPad-based LAMP program in late 2019.

We made an early switch because we weren’t sure how to model the device for EJ early on. There’s more initial training with LAMP for the adults to get the hang of it, but TouchChat helped us feel more engaged in the process with EJ sooner. Later, it became almost over-personalized as he’d repeatedly push his favorite words. I felt like it was time for a fresh system, so we returned to LAMP.

LAMP helped him break some impulsive repetitious loops. For example, one word that comes to mind is ironically something woven together in a loop of its own: PRETZELS. He would press PRETZELS repeatedly, which probably meant he wanted lots of pretzels, but sometimes he just  wanted to hear the device say something over and over. In most programs, users are able to do that by just pressing the word over and over (so it's very rewarding to repeat). LAMP, however, brings users back to the home page after a selection so you have to navigate back to the page with the word you want to repeat. If you make that effort then I think it's a clearer indication that you did want to repeat a word for emphasis.

Much like moving through these pages has been helpful, so has movement in video form. We’ve been inspired by John Halloran’s GIF idea where he created a PowerPoint with GIFs of LAMP home page words. Students get to see a GIF in action to illustrate the meaning of the core word they’re learning. For EJ who loves movement and videos, it’s helped anchor the meaning of words, especially verbs which are very hard to conceptualize without movement. We have always tried to use lots of visuals for this reason, and EJ actually enjoys making activities and finding images and GIFs to relate back to what he’s learning. (NOTE: If you want to try this approach, he’d probably recommend the Toy Story and SpongeBob GIFs for some fun, familiar characters!).

When we’re not bonding over GIFs, we like to read together … but it didn’t always come naturally. I’d often forget the simple concept of just using LAMP silently myself as we sit and read a book together. EJ and I read a page at a time and take turns commenting on it without expectation (I recommend both the parent and the child use LAMP and ideally, use it on more than one device).

Keeping it casual and discovering where words are together is a super way to spend quality time with your child. Whether it’s shared reading, at the dinner table, playing board games, or other times, there are many great opportunities to model LAMP without expectations. I know that can feel odd at first, but taking the pressure off and honoring all communication is what we do for our typical toddlers as they develop communication and language skills. We need to do this to help ALL students ALL day and EVERY day.

Sometimes, I hear EJ using his device in another room and I'll go in to see what he's chatting about. These types of interactions give him opportunity and access. It has helped us both reduce frustration about understanding each other and given him a way to express himself with words.

He’s still working on initiating commenting, but when he wants to find a word, he generally can. He learns paths and finds words I don’t even recall teaching! At one point, our biggest challenge was EJ’s preference to communicate on an iPhone. He has come so far with his fine motor skills, and that’s wonderful, however, at the time, LAMP wasn’t available for iPhones. That’s why we used TouchChat when we were out and about. 

I encourage parents new to speech-generating devices to enjoy the journey. Yes, there’s plenty to learn, but be patient with yourself. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that LAMP takes more buy-in and commitment on the front end for the team, but I believe it is the better long-term system for the non-traditional communicator. It’s why I’m now a LAMP Certified Provider (LCP).