The Autism Little Learners Podcast

AAC modeling in daily routines doesn't have to be perfect to make a meaningful difference. In fact, what if trying to do AAC perfectly is actually getting in the way of doing it consistently? You listen to a podcast, attend a training, and learn all these wonderful strategies for supporting AAC users. You're ready to keep AAC accessible, presume competence, model without expectation, honor all com...

Understanding the different communicative functions of AAC means looking beyond "I want" and helping autistic preschoolers communicate what really matters to them. Their family celebrates when Lily says NO. That's what Stefanie, Lily's mom, told me, and this week you'll hear her tell it herself. Including the morning Lily looked at her mom and said, "Words inside." This is week four of our AAC Awa...

What color is it? Where's the dog? Show me red. Tell me with your talker. If you support AAC users, you might be really good at quiz mode. I know I was. As an SLP, I was trained to elicit responses. I wanted repetitions. I wanted data. I wanted to know: can they do it? And here's the tricky part: quiz mode feels like teaching. We're trying to help. But communication isn't supposed to feel like a t...

As we continue AAC Awareness Month, I want to talk about an idea that kept far too many children from getting access to robust communication for far too long: The idea that a child has to be "ready" for AAC. Maybe they need to point first. Match pictures. Understand cause and effect. Show intentional communication. Sit and attend. Or start with something "simpler" before they can have access to a...

A quick heads up before you listen: Jordyn prepared some answers ahead of time and responded to others in real time, so you'll hear pauses between each question and Jordyn's answer. I challenge you to resist the urge to fast-forward through the wait time. Sitting with that silence is one of the most important skills of a good communication partner — in this episode, and in your classroom.   As we...

When an autistic child is melting down, refusing, running away, or saying "no," what looks like challenging behavior may actually be a stress response or an important form of communication. In this episode, Tara is revisiting the way we think about behavior in autistic preschoolers and asking us to look underneath what we can see on the outside. Instead of starting with "How do I stop this behavio...

Transitions are often the first part of the preschool day to fall apart for autistic children, especially when routines change, activities end, or expectations shift quickly. Every. Single. Year. In this episode, Tara is talking less about transition tricks and more about why transitions are genuinely so hard for many autistic preschoolers. A transition can involve much more than moving from one a...

If you're looking for the best visual supports for autistic preschoolers, these five foundational tools can make classroom routines, transitions, communication, and everyday expectations easier to understand. In this episode, Tara is going back to the basics and sharing five of her favorite visual supports for young autistic children. These are the supports she returns to again and again because t...

Supporting regulation in the classroom starts with understanding what an autistic child's nervous system needs before we focus on expectations, participation, or learning. That's why regulation is the focus of Week 3 of our Back to School Foundations series. By early September, you've probably moved past those first days of school when everyone is learning names, exploring the classroom, and figur...

Building a positive connection with autistic students is one of the most important things we can focus on at the beginning of a new school year. That's why I'm making connection the focus of Week 2 of our Back to School Foundations series. There's something about that second week of school, too. The first few days are behind you, the excitement and whirlwind of getting everyone through the door ha...

This is Week 1 of 6 in the Back to School Foundations replay series. While I'm in Portland helping my daughter move into her first house, I'm revisiting six episodes I think will help most as you head back to school. New season starts Tuesday, September 29th, with five weeks on AAC for AAC Awareness Month. So much of what goes wrong in September is really about something that was never put in plac...

"Don't buy him letters." That's what a professional told Cari Ebert when her son Aaron was two. He was "obsessed," they said, and needed to be moved toward more appropriate play. Cari ignored them. Those letters were how Aaron showed joy, and how she connected with him. Nearly two decades later, that same deep interest in letters, numbers, and dates is what landed him a job he loves. That moment i...

The one who melts down at the smallest request, who seems to dig in the moment you say "do this."...you know this child.  In this episode I sit down with Casey Ehrlich, PhD — social scientist, founder of At Peace Parents, and a leader in the first peer-reviewed PDA research in the United States — to talk about PDA: what it is, why it's a nervous system response rather than defiance, and what actua...

That child who waits for you to start every sentence? In this replay I sit down with SLP Alexandria Zachos — founder of Meaningful Speech — to talk about how years of prompting quietly create prompt dependence, and how silence, connection, and a child-led approach help gestalt language processors find their own spontaneous voice. Prompting doesn't lead to spontaneous language. Connection, silence,...

Teaching autistic preschoolers can feel lonely. This is the episode where I pull back the curtain on the membership that became the opposite of that island — where it came from, what's inside, and the community that surprised me most. Teaching young autistic children can feel like being on an island. The membership is the opposite of that. I'll tell you how it began in grief, after I lost my dad i...

My non-speaking three-year-old student told me "This is boring" on his AAC device. That moment changed everything for me, because that is communication, and that is competence. It's exactly what today's episode is about: presuming competence, an idea that quietly shapes everything else we do with young autistic children. Because so often, the ability was there all along. What was missing wasn't th...

What if defiance is really dysregulation? In this episode I sit down with Alyssa Blask Campbell — New York Times bestselling author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions, founder of Seed & Sow, and co-creator of the Collaborative Emotion Processing method — to talk about emotional intelligence, unique nervous systems, and why the behavior we find hardest is so often a child asking for support. When we see...

Imagine understanding every word around you while the adults talk over you like you're not even there — and not having a reliable way to communicate until you're almost 19. That's part of Jordyn Zimmerman's story . Jordyn is an autistic woman who is non-speaking and a full-time AAC user, and in this conversation she shares, from lived experience, what will change how you show up in your classroom....

He was banging his head on the floor, and Tara remembers the tears sliding down her cheeks and the only words she could find: "How can I help you?" That moment, and dozens of others over 25 years in the classrooms,  the real origin story of the Preschool Autism Summit . In this episode, we flip the script. Instead of Tara behind the mic, her teammate Shawna takes over as host and interviews Tara a...

What if behavior isn't something to stop, but something to listen to? In this episode, we're talking about one of the biggest mindset shifts happening in autism education right now: moving from compliance-based teaching toward connection, regulation, and understanding. Because what often gets labeled as "behavior" in preschool classrooms is actually communication. I'll walk you through what change...

In this episode, we're talking about something so many of us were taught to do with the best of intentions, but that can quietly work against us: prompting. Because when nearly every interaction becomes a question, a direction, or a cue, communication can actually shrink instead of grow. I'll walk you through what happens when a child learns that communication only ever shows up after an adult pro...

In this episode, we're talking about echolalia, what it really is, what it's doing, and why so many autistic children communicate this way. For years, many educators and therapists were taught to reduce echolalia or move children "past it." But research, autistic voices, and deeper understanding of gestalt language processing have helped shift that thinking in important ways. Echolalia is not mean...

In this episode, we're talking about something that often gets overlooked in early language development: symbolic sounds and exclamatory words. The "vrooooms," "uh-ohs," "wheees," and "mooos" that many children use before traditional words are not meaningless sounds. They are real communication. This conversation explores why these early sounds matter so much, especially for autistic preschoolers,...

In this episode, we bring everything together and move into the how. After exploring what deep interests are and why forcing engagement backfires, we now look at how to actually incorporate a child's deep interests to support meaningful learning. If you've ever planned a thoughtful activity only to watch a child walk away, this conversation will help you shift how you approach teaching. Instead of...

In this encore episode, we're revisiting one of the most meaningful conversations from the early days of the podcast — a wide-ranging chat with speech-language pathologist Nicole Casey about gestalt language processing, echolalia, and what it really takes to support autistic communicators. What if the words a child is repeating aren't random? Gestalt language processing (GLP) is a natural way of a...