Using AAC at a Theme Park: What Works in a Forty-Minute Queue

It is tempting to build a theme park board around the rides and expect the big moments to be when it gets used — cresting the first hill, the splash at the bottom. That is almost never what happens. Coasters are too loud and too fast for anyone to say anything.

What you actually get is forty minutes standing in a queue. That turns out to be the whole opportunity.

A park is a high-excitement, low-language place

Think about what a day at a park actually consists of. Noise. Crowds. Hands full of a bag, a drink, a phone, somebody else’s hat. Long stretches of standing still, punctuated by ninety seconds of something too intense to narrate.

For a communicator that combination is rough. It is exactly the environment where everyone talks at you — isn’t this fun, are you excited, look how tall it is — and nobody leaves room for an answer. Not out of unkindness. It is just loud, and every adult present is managing logistics.

The queue is the fix, because the queue is the only slow part of the day.

Five things that work

1. Treat the line as the main event. Twenty to forty minutes standing in one place, with a huge shared thing to look at, is a better language opportunity than most quiet rooms. Point at the coaster. Say tall. Say scary. Say fast. Then wait longer than feels comfortable.

2. Give them a way to say no. This is the one that gets skipped. A board that can only enthuse is a board that only works while your child is having a good time. I don’t like and afraid need to be as reachable as again. A communicator who can decline a ride is one who will trust you about the next one.

3. Comment, do not quiz. “What ride is this?” is a test. “Woody looks scared too” is a conversation. This is the same principle as modelling without quizzing, applied in a very noisy room.

4. Narrate after, not during. Expect nothing mid-ride. The talking happens in the ten minutes afterwards, walking to the next thing, while the feeling is still fresh and the noise has dropped. Wet. Fast. Scary. Fun. Again.

5. Let again mean something. If they say again and you can do it, do it. Nothing teaches “this board changes what happens to me” faster.

Ride names matter less than you would think

Our Six Flags board has eleven coasters on it. The buttons that earn their place are wait, again, scary and eat.

That is not an argument against ride buttons — being able to name Tormenta when you mean that specific enormous drop is real, and it matters. But if you are adapting a board yourself and have room for only a handful of additions, the small words do more work than the proper nouns. Themed vocabulary sits alongside a core-word system, never instead of it.

Two practical things

Load the board the night before, not in the parking lot. Import it, find the page, and put the page-link button somewhere reachable one-handed while holding a churro.

Screenshot the board to your phone. When the device battery dies at four in the afternoon — and it will — you can still point at a picture.

The board

Ours is free, like everything else here: Six Flags Over Texas AAC Template for TouchChat. Eight characters, eleven rides, and the sixteen words above.

None of this is specific to Six Flags. Swap the ride names and it is Disney, Legoland, Universal, the county fair or the pier. The pattern holds: the line is where the talking happens.