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You can download this article (and the list of jokes) here:
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When setting up a vocabulary for a child (or adult) who uses a voice output communication aid, major priorities are:
- how to get him/her to WANT to use it?
- how to make it sociable and interactive? (ie. so that other communication partners will want him/her to use it)
- how to make it empowering, so that he/she can ‘hold the floor’ and experience some ‘control’ in a communication situation?
Most children seem to find it quite difficult (boring?) to use the so-called ‘social vocabulary’ (hello, how are you, fine, how are you?…). But they generally enjoy having jokes to tell. They may manage by themselves to draw in individual communication partners, using jokes, or, if the situation can be ‘engineered’ imaginatively by adults, they may get to command a whole roomful of listeners at Circle time, Assembly, or a play, drama/video or language session.
Therapists, teachers and families have to source suitable jokes, to programme in. Help! I don’t know about you, but I can only ever remember about one joke, ever (ie. What do you get if you cross an elephant with a fish? Swimming trunks! Thanks to somebody in Cauldeen Primary School for that one, and to Morna for re-telling it constantly on her DynaVox with such verve and enthusiasm!). OK, children can get a great laugh from re-telling the same jokes many times. But to be fun, and socially effective in drawing in communication partners, one really needs a constant supply of new jokes. Finding more jokes is always possible but inevitably time consuming.
This resource aims to supply you with a pile of idiotic jokes that will help you to quickly refresh the vocabularies of VOCA users without sending you off to steal other children’s comics and joke books. They are in no particular order here (and may or may not be ‘owned’ by someone, who knows, so please don’t try to sell them or publish them on yourself!) Many thanks to Rosie Gilbride in Highland for her son’s comics, and to Sarah Marjoribanks of the CALL Centre for the research and collection work (trawling the internet and weeding out unsuitable material).
Rather than just programming jokes in yourself, it is really important to involve the child. Choosing the ‘right’ joke(s) together (say from 3 or 4 options, and lots of time for repetition and explanation etc.) is a good way to make sure the child understands and likes the joke (although a lot of kids will enjoy the attention and the social interaction if another person laughs, even if they don’t quite understand it themselves). A lot of children’s jokes are based on ‘sort of puns’, which can be quite a useful ‘assessment window’ into their language understanding ability (phonological analysis and semantic processing connections.).
How you lay the joke out on the VOCA overlay is another key issue. The main priority is that the user can reliably and quickly link the right ‘starter line’ up with the right punchline – ie. this is a social exercise that must go right, NOT a time to make things challenging for the user, or a test! Use of a colour code (2 parts of the same joke in lighter and dark shades of the same colour - always light first, then dark for punchline?) might help. So will supportive use of spatial layout, ie. putting the jokes in pairs of 2 cells, always left for the starter line and right for punchline. (Or all starters down the left of the screen - or all along the top - with all the punchlines lined up to match them on the other half of the screen.) HAVE FUN!!
The list of jokes is too long to reproduce on this page, so click on the html icon below to view them in a new webpage, or download the pdf or word files of this article.
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