Sensory Exploration Communication Boards (Digital Downloads Only)

This resource includes the following digital downloads:

• High Colour Contrast Fringe Communication Board – Sensory Exploration
• Low Colour Contrast Fringe Communication Board – Sensory Exploration
• Gestalt/Phrase Communication Board – Sensory Exploration

These fringe communication boards have been designed to use in conjunction with any sensory play your child is engaging with at home or in the clinic.

You can use communication boards during play by pointing to the key words in your sentence as you’re talking or by pointing to an entire gestalt. By doing this, you are giving your child a visual that they can see and eventually point to in interactions/communications. By combining the visual with the written words, you can also start to increase your child’s literacy.

Fringe (topic) vocabulary refers to vocabulary that is more specific to a topic, environment or individual. Fringe vocabulary is not generic and will likely not be used across environments, but in a certain setting with certain communication partners.

Research shows us that by providing children with visual communication supports and by presuming competence, we support them to learn language they can use to communicate with a range of people, in a range of places, for a range of reasons (e.g. commenting, saying “no”, requesting, asking a question).

The boards have been designed using the colours from the adapted Fitzgerald Key:

• Orange – Nouns
• Green – Verbs
• Yellow – Pronouns
• Blue – Adjectives
• Pink – Prepositions & Social Words
• Purple – Questions
• Red – Negation & Emergency Words
• Brown – Adverbs
• Grey – Determiners (e.g. a, the)
• White – Conjunctions (e.g. because, but)