Halloween is loud, dark, full of strangers, and built entirely out of costumes that break the rules about what faces look like. For a lot of our kids it is a hard night.
It is also, structurally, one of the best language weeks of the year, because it is the same short script repeated forty times in a row. Walk up. Knock. Say the thing. Get the thing. Leave. Repeat. Predictable repetition is exactly what a new communication board user needs, and it almost never comes packaged this neatly.
Six words, prepared in advance
Not thirty. Six, modelled at home for a week or two before the night itself, so they are familiar rather than new:
- go and stop, which are the whole night in two words
- more, for one more house
- all done, for going home
- scared
- look, for every single thing they will want to point at
Trick or treat is fun to add and worth adding, but it is a script, not vocabulary. It will not do anything for your child in November. The six above will.
Put the exit on the board
This is the part that matters more than the fun words. A child who can say all done and be believed, immediately, the first time, learns something much bigger than a holiday word. They learn that the board has real power over what happens to them.
So decide before you leave the house that all done ends the night. Not "two more houses first." Not "but your brother wants to keep going." Honouring it once, visibly, buys more communication in the following month than any amount of practice.
The same goes for scared. If it gets a response, it gets used again.
Try this before the night
Practise the script at home with your own front door. Knock, open, hand over a snack, close. Five rounds, using go, more and all done yourself each time. On the night, the whole thing will already be familiar.
One more thing worth doing: if you take photos of the costume, they make excellent board tiles afterwards. A picture of your own child dressed as a dinosaur is a more motivating tile than any stock symbol.