Snack Talk: Increasing Communication Engagement During Mealtimes
Title: Snack Talk: Increasing Communication Engagement During Mealtimes
Date: Thursday, October 5th, 2023, 2:00 - 3:00 PM Eastern Time
Description: This session will focus on Snack Talk, a visual communication support to facilitate conversation engagement among children of all abilities during mealtimes. Snack Talk is a low cost, easy to implement intervention that combines a universally designed visual with least to most prompting. This intervention can be embedded during naturally occurring daily activities and routines. Snack Talk is ideal for inclusive settings as it provides opportunities for children to engage in back-and-forth communication among children with diverse language profiles. Additionally, this intervention provides educators with a simplistic intervention to implement that supports communication and social skills development during a commonly underutilized time in classrooms. Snack Talk is aligned with many DEC Recommended Practices spanning across multiple topic areas including the following: E1, E2, INS4, INS5, INS6, INS8, INT2, and INT3.
Research conducted on the Snack Talk intervention is published is multiple journals, including implementation with young children, elementary aged children, as well as adults with disabilities.
Our session seeks to provide educators with the knowledge and skills needed to develop Snack Talk visuals, implement Snack Talk, and collect data to analyze the effects of intervention.
Objectives:
Participants will learn about Snack Talk and how to develop these visual communication supports.
Participants will learn how to implement Snack Talk.
Participants will learn how to adapt Snack Talk to include the unique interests of all learners.
Participants will learn how to collect data to determine effectiveness of intervention.
Presenters: Katherine Bateman, PhD, BCBA-D
Katherine Bateman is Research Scientist at the Haring Center for Inclusive Education at the University of Washington. Dr. Bateman is a Behavior Analyst and much of her focuses on classroom based interventions for young children with autism and other related disabilities.