A new communication board can arrive with twelve hundred symbols already on it, or it can arrive empty and waiting to be filled. Either way the first instinct is the same: get everything in there. Every food the child likes, every toy, every family member, every place.
It feels like preparation. It is usually the thing that stalls the whole project.
The short answer is about ten words. The longer answer is that the ten is a limit on you, not on the board.
Why the nouns do not work
Picture words are easy to draw and easy to teach, so boards fill up with them. The problem is that nouns are the least useful words a person owns. Count what you said out loud yesterday. Almost none of it was naming things.
A few hundred core words account for roughly 80 percent of everything anyone says in a day, and hardly any of them are nouns. They are the small, boring, flexible words: more, go, stop, that, not, mine, help, want, look, again. They work in every room, at every age, about every subject. A child with ten core words can protest, request, direct, refuse, and comment. A child with forty snack photos can order lunch.
Ten words to start with
If you are beginning, or restarting, these ten will carry more weight than any hundred nouns:
- more and all done, the two ends of everything
- go and stop
- want and not
- help
- look
- mine
- again
Keep them in the same place. A word that moves is a word your child has to search for instead of reach for, and reaching is the goal. Motor memory does a lot of quiet work here, which is why therapists get so particular about layouts staying still.
Leave the rest of the board alone
This is the part that gets missed. Starting with ten words does not mean stripping the board back to ten. Leave the twelve hundred symbols where they are. Your child will wander into them, and that is good.
It means your attention goes to ten words, because you are the one doing the modelling, and ten is a number a tired adult can actually hold in their head at the end of a long day. The board can be as big as it likes. The list in your head is what has to be small.
Try this
Choose three of the ten. Not ten, three. Use only those three yourself for a week, everywhere you can force them to fit. You will be surprised how far more, stop, and look stretch when they are all you have.