Cognitive Communication: Functional Activities Manual

Cognitive communication rehabilitation activity manual is for adults with acquired brain injuries (ABI), such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, tumor or dementia. It can be used by individuals who are in high school, who have returned from the military or who have developed cognitive based language challenges from any type of brain trauma. It is also helpful for persons with age related memory loss and mild cognitive impairments.

This manual is created for persons who wish to enhance their cognitive communicative skills. It provides many problem solving cognitive-language based activities. This manual develops moderate language levels that allow individuals to expand basic cognitive communication skills to more complex levels. It provides three basic segments.

The first segment helps increase word finding skills. It relies on words that are used daily to communicate functional wants and needs. The user can work on these lists in a number of ways to enhance ability to complete communication with significant others in the environment.

The second segment has exercises in word comprehension. It is based on simple reading activities and categorization exercises that stimulate memory for functional reading tasks. The user can develop skills to assist in completion of interactive participation in community activities that require reading.

The final section provides additional exercises for reading at the sentence level and beyond. Many individuals enjoy looking at magazines or the web to gather information. Exercises such as these allow for testing comprehension and expanding language skills to help people function more independently in their homes and communities.