On the ASHA Leader's Blog, SLP Rebecca Eisenberg suggests the following tips for how to use characters and media to encourage communication and social engagement:

1. Use popular characters in BINGO to encourage communication, commenting and responding to "wh" questions.

2. Use motivating video clips to stimulate conversations, and facilitate discussions with specific topics (taken from events in the clips).

3. Role-play from movies/TV and act-out scenes to pretend play specific social interactions and related emotions and non-verbal communication, and practice conflict resolution and problem solving skills.

4.  Practice story development featuring the child's choice ofcharacter, or print story scenes to work on sequencing and story re-tell.

5. Use books featuring favorite characters to motivate children to read (targeting fluency and inflection), and then work on language skills by answering story comprehension questions, making predictions, and discussing the story.