Choosing Your First Button Words
Let TTB explain how to choose starter words that are right for your unique learner, and what the function of starting words is to the button teaching process.
Before we begin
If you’re not familiar with the terms we use in the button teaching community, read our definitions guide first. We use some terms quite specifically so it’s important we’re on the same page.
What are starter words?
The first words you use with your learner while you’re teaching them how buttons work are your starter words.
We think it’s ideal to have at least six buttons before you start teaching. You don’t need to put six buttons down at once, three is really the sweet spot, but you should have additional blank buttons in reserve so that you can add new words the moment the need arises and not have to wait until you can buy more. Starting with fewer than six is liable to leave you in a situation where you need to add another word and can’t, and that can be frustrating to you and your learner.
Starting words are your Rosetta Stone.
You’re using words they already know to introduce what buttons are and how they work.
Starting words are your Rosetta Stone. You aren't just teaching your learner words with these, you're teaching them what a button is (it's an object they can interact with, it makes a noise, it's not a toy), how it works (you push it, it makes a noise, a thing happens when they hear that noise), and that different buttons/noises mean different things (different specific things happen with each button). That's a lot of stuff. We're humans, used to working with tools and we use buttons everyday but the idea of a button is not intuitive to our learners at all.
Start with familiar words
Starting with words that your learner knows and likes makes the soundboard fun and interesting and motivates them to want to figure out how they work. Once your learner has the concept down, then you can begin adding words that your learner is less familiar with or that aren't things you can model as frequently, or say yes to every time.
If you have a learner that’s new to your home, they might be learning basic words. We’ve got a guide that shares some thoughts on when you might want to start teaching talking buttons with a new member of the household here.
What makes a good starter word?
Starter words are individual, as every learner is different, but there are some broad favorites. Words like Play, Outside (meaning anything that happens outside, not just potty breaks), Game or Puzzle, Pets/Cuddles, Food/Treats, all tend to be favorites across dogs and cats.
A great starter word for you is one that's highly motivating to your specific learner and that you offer, model, and respond positively to multiple times a day. So for instance if your dog loooooves visiting Grandma's house but that's something you only do once a week, that wouldn't be a good starting word because you wouldn’t be able to model it often, and you'd have to say no most of the times they press it. If your cat is on a really strict feeding schedule for health reasons, don’t add Food as a starter word because you’ll have to say no. We’ve got a whole post on food words here which discusses how and when to add food words.
Be realistic about what you can manage, and choose words that work for your situation. If your dog likes walks but your mobility is sometimes limited, then Outside might be a better starter word - because you can use it for short plays in the garden, toilet trips, and longer walks - rather than Walk, which you couldn’t do multiple times a day.
Think creatively and broadly here though - if your dog likes treats then Treat might be a good starter word, but you’ll need to cut up their favourite biscuits and sausages into smaller pieces so you can model the word lots, and also give them a treat each time they ask without overfeeding them. If your cat doesn’t really like treats but likes their flirt pole, puzzles, wind up mouse and playing hide and seek games, maybe Play is a great word to start with (and you might want to add names of more specific activities later).
Your starter words should have broad meaning so that you can use them in a wide variety of contexts. For instance “Play” might mean playing with a human, or playing with another animal. It could be fetch, or chase, or hide and seek, or wrestling, or tug, or ‘killing’ a soft toy. If you choose “Tug” as a starter instead, you’re limiting your chances to model and cutting off your learner’s ability to talk about all the other things that might fall under the broader umbrella of “Play.” You can always add “Tug” later if it seems like your learner wants to talk about that activity specifically.
How motivating is too motivating?
A lot of people worry about adding words that are too motivating to the board, thinking that if they give their learner the ability to ask for something like treats or their favorite toy that they’ll turn into a demanding monster. This concern is largely unjustified. What is true though is that every learner will become excited by their buttons, and they also need to experiment to figure out how they work. Setting reasonable boundaries with a word that is being used very frequently is something every teacher has to do, and we talk about that in detail in our article about spamming here.
We recommend two really exciting words (Play, Food, Treat, Outside are common examples), and one calmer word, something like Pets, Brush, Snuggles or Love You that's nice, feels good, but also is relaxing. That balance means that a wide range of things are being modelled, and also, every time you approach the board your learner won’t be so excited about whatever amazing high-energy thing is about to happen that they can't focus.
Bunny LOVES her Love You button.
Love You is a great starter word because it’s something we can say lots to our learners and respond really positively to when it’s pressed - “Thank you! I love you too Bunny!”
We don’t think you need to start with an All Done button on the board. You can start with it on the board, but we’d recommend you add it as button 4 (so you still have 3 really motivating words) and only if your learner is already familiar with the phrase.
We think it’s most powerful to introduce a word like All Done in the moment when you need it. The reason for this is that talking buttons are learner led communication. Early on you want your learner to experiment and “All Done” can be difficult to model when it’s pressed experimentally. You don’t want to confuse a learner who still doesn’t quite understand how the buttons work yet.
Remember that you need to show that buttons are consistent and meaningful, so if your learner keeps experimentally pressing “All Done” or “Finished” then you’ll need to show them what that means by responding positively, which might be you simply noticing they’ve finished playing recently so saying “yes, play all done” but it could mean ending the activity you and your learner are doing, or stopping working on your laptop or watching TV because that’s the only thing that’s happening in the room. That’s especially the case if your learner doesn’t already know what that term means. They’ll struggle to understand its meaning if you don’t respond consistently.
Work on your word for ‘something being over’ verbally and it will make it much easier to add to the board when you need it. Say it after every activity is finished, and make sure to use it in relation to things that your learner will be happy to be over “bath all done”, “Mum work all done”, “rain all done”. It should be a neutral word. You don’t want it to become the “fun is over” button.
If you are struggling with word choice or how to model concepts, it’s useful to write down the concept and think of 5-10 different ways you would model the word during a typical day. This will help you become clear on what the concept means in your household and if the word you’re considering is the right fit.
Be clear on your concepts
Make sure that you’re teaching your learner that each word has a distinct meaning. “Food” needs to mean “the food you eat for a meal” and “Treats” needs to mean “Occasional nice snack” or whatever the meaning is for you, and that needs to be reinforced every time you say the word and every time you press the button. Don’t give them treats when they’ve pressed “Food” because you think that’s what they’d rather have right now. If you’re blurring the concepts it’s common for learners to just see all the buttons as an “attention” button. That’s really easy to accidentally reinforce at first because we’re really keen to see progress, and there’s an awful lot of things our learners want with limited buttons - plus we’re learning too!
More than one learner
If you have more than one learner, think about words that are motivating for each one of them. These could be the same, or they might be completely different.
Make sure that you can respond positively to presses by all your learners, otherwise that’s going to be confusing. Starting with Catnip for your cat and Bone for your dog will put you in a situation where your dog experimentally asks for catnip and then you either give the dog catnip, which isn’t very rewarding, or you say “no” which is even less rewarding. Start with a very general word like Treat and you can add more specific words when you’re further along in the process.
If your learners would be motivated by different words, going up to 4 or 5 words to begin with is fine and still manageable for you.
Is there a list of words to add first?
Over time, we’ve seen so many different first (and first few) words that those of us who coach beginners regularly don’t think having a suggested list of words or an order to add them is helpful. What often happens is that teachers plan too rigidly and then feel like they’ve done something wrong if the order they’ve planned ends up not working for their learner. We want to guide new teachers in a way that doesn’t encourage those feelings and sets everybody up for a smooth start.
By all means look around for inspiration, but some learners aren’t motivated by the words that we will see across social media as starter words, and that’s absolutely fine. We’ve heard some teachers feel guilty or like they’ve done something wrong by not adding a button that everybody else seems to have. We don’t want people to feel they need to add that button if it’s something that’s better added later or not at all. There are words on any generic list we could write that just wouldn’t be a great starting point for some households.
While it was the first word for a lot of the earliest button users and still is for many learners, “outside” wouldn’t be a great starting point for a house cat who doesn’t spend much time looking out of the window and lives in a third floor apartment (because you can’t say yes most of the time), or a dog who has free access to a garden (because something they never need to ask for isn’t going to be motivating), for example.
Takeaway points
The key to teaching a talking button beginner is showing them buttons represent specific words and that each word has a specific consequence. When you (and then your learner) press a button something predictable needs to happen every time so they come to understand the link.
Words you can’t model often or respond positively to most of the time don’t allow you to do that. Choose starter words that you can use frequently, in a wide variety of contexts to best show your learner how talking buttons work.
Choose starter words which are motivating to your learner and you can do/offer/say yes to most of the time.
Your starter words don’t have to be the same as the ones you’ve seen other people use - pick the ones that work for you
Think about whether an accidental press of a button would be a teachable moment, and if it isn’t then that probably isn’t a great first word.
