Learning to understand what an emerging AAC user is trying to communicate can be challenging but recently a couple of things have clicked into place for us.

After watching a trailer for Back to the Outback, an animated comedy adventure set in Australia, Quinns clearly told us he wanted to watch it by going to his animals board on the eye gaze and choosing the words ‘snake’, ‘spider’ and ‘koala bear’; three of the main characters from the film. Whenever we asked what he wanted to do he would repeat the same three animals followed by ‘remote’ until we finally had time to sit down and watch it. 

Although he loved it, giggling his way through the entire movie, the next time we asked him what he wanted to do he said ‘plane’, ‘helicopter’, ‘fire engine’ followed by ‘remote’. It took us a while but we eventually worked out that he was referring to an already favourite film of his, Planes: Fire and Rescue, a spin off from the classic Pixar film Cars based on fire planes and helicopters rather than cars and trucks.

This is a brilliant step in his ability to communicate what he wants to watch without us having to programme all the films that ever existed into the eye gaze! 

Quickly following this discovery, one evening at the dinner table Quinns interrupted our conversation with an obvious request for music. Dad usually puts some on when he sits down at the table but on this occasion he hadn’t. Quinns chose ‘song’ and ‘piano’ on the eye gaze before looking expectantly at Dad. A playlist was chosen on the basis of what Quinns had just been talking about ‘rain’, ‘clouds’, ‘weather’ (there may have been a film request in there but we didn’t manage to work it out if there was!) First up was Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

With music now in the background our dinner time conversation resumed until suddenly Quinns got VERY excited! His entire body was in such motion he could barely keep still enough to choose the words he wanted to say. He managed to choose “plane, helicopter, helicopter…” before looking around us all hoping that one of us would realise what he was saying. But we all just looked at each other knowing there was something but no idea what so he repeated ‘helicopter’ a couple more times before changing board to say ‘song’.

It still took us a while but suddenly it clicked and we realised the AC/DC song that was playing had been used in Quinns’ favourite film, Planes: Fire and Rescue or as he likes to call it ‘plane, helicopter, fire engine’.

So now we know Quinns can identify films and their songs and tell us about it just as long as we can guess from his clues. Anyone for a game of AAC charades?!