Christopher was in a good mood today despite informing me some things were bothering him. He didn't go into detail but was still able to focus on today's task. We continued testing with the CELF5 in the area of Recalling Sentences. In this section I provided Chris with sentences of varying length and ask him to repeat them back to me exactly as I stated them. After hearing the directions, Chris stated this may be hard for him because sometimes he has a hard time remembering things. I asked him to clarify if he felt it was hard to remember things that he just heard or things from awhile ago. He decided both but also noted he's not sure he's always listening, which I found to be an astute observation to come up with on his own. We also briefly discussed how the rest of last week went during recess. He said he tried his best to avoid certain classmates and would keep trying to engage in friendship building activities with classmates he prefers to associate with. Overall, I think Chris is making great observations into social relationships with his classmates.
During our second session today we continued with the CELF5 testing. Today we tested in the areas of word classes and formulating sentences. Word classes focused on choosing two words in a set of four that had some sort of semantic relationship such as location, synonym, or semantic class. I will determine a score at the end of testing but I did notice that Richard demonstrated a strength in working memory as he was able to retain, repeat, and manipulate the order of the words after hearing them. The section on formulating sentences required Richard to look at a picture and create a grammatically correct sentence given a specific word to include. I will be able to determine more information regarding age appropriate strengths and difficulties after scoring the entire test.
Richard was recovering from a cold from last week. He said he was feeling much better but still a little sick. We worked on /th/ in the final position of words at the word and sentence level. He completed the task with 90% accuracy at the word level and 80% accuracy at the sentence level. His few errors occurred when his rate of speech was increased and less attention was put on accuracy of the sound. We continued with /th/ in the medial position of words and sentence level. Here the accuracy was higher ~90%. The errors in the medial position seemed to be more habitual errors (i.e. Bir/t/day for birthday, too-paste for toothpaste) and again were more noticeable as rate of speech increased. I also noticed when I asked him to put the word into a sentence, he spent more effort on creating a sentence than on the accuracy of production as expected. Overall, he is doing great and seems to be aware of his errors and often self correcting them. We added a few trials working on reducing rate of speech and thinking of the entire thought/sentence before stating it.
Chris was eager for the session to commence, as he had quite of bit of "news" to share this morning. Scaffolding supports were initially provided to best facilitate both temporal and linguistic organization. Topic expansion was strong and conversational reciprocity across topics was characterized by increased cycles of exchange. Instances of speaker- speaker overlap were supported with familiar cue strategies. Cycles of exchange were supported with question stimuli and subsequent carrier phrase use to allow for increased comment/comment exchanges.
Expanded discussion in the areas of self awareness, presupposition and perspective taking were also a focus of the session today. Carryover of target /s/ phoneme production within phrases was reviewed as well. Strong session.
In today's session we continued the CELF-5 testing in the areas of following directions and sentence formation. We continued the session by discussing how we can make a new student feel welcome or how we can get to know a new student and possibly make a new friend. Chris was able to tell me a few ways he would be comfortable making a new friend and a few ways that he did not feel comfortable. He stated he prefers a more casual approach and does not like being forced to make new friendships. We also had another discussion about conflict and conflict resolution and about using our internal filter to determine if certain jokes are appropriate for certain audiences. I.E. a joke that may be acceptable/funny around his friends or peers may not go over as well around adults.
The session commenced with Chris excitedly sharing the new Mario plush toys that he had received. This afforded an opportunity to expand upon the many versions of Mario plush characters that he has in his collection. Conversational reciprocity was strong this session as topic maintenance was sustained with notable increases in vocabulary specificity and stronger use of cohesive ties. Response to requests for clarification when details or information was not "shared knowledge" was noted consistently. These opportunities allowed for review and expansion into the aspects of presupposition and perspective taking. Expanded discussion regarding his plans for the weekend allowed for additional cycles of exchange, with notable decreases in speaker-speaker overlap. Attention, motivation and sustained engagement were observed to be strong today.
The session commenced with Chris rapidly sharing ideas and topics that were clearly on his mind. Supports to minimize speaker-speaker overlap were highlighted, as familiar reflective listening and "self awareness" cues were provided. Attentional shifting was strong this session, and cues to enhance use of transitional phrases were provided as well. Chris' demeanor was once again not consistent with his usual self. He utilized "jokes" as well as "previously heard short phrases" in a random fashion in an apparent attempt to safeguard what was really on his mind. The flow of the session afforded an opportunity to once again expand upon the aspects of self generated ideas and language vs. use of previously heard "snippets" from videos that he's seen. The importance of perspective taking and presupposition were reviewed as well.
Christopher had a good session today. He was initially a little hesitant and again informed me it is beacuse he knows we are working on social cues and he prefers not to. We began the pragmatic portion of the CELF5 assessment. We also discussed different ways to make friends and how to interact with kids that we'd prefer not to be friends with. We also discussed ways to be a good friend. Chris made a great decision at the end of the session to join the next group class and also expressed interest in checking in on a classmate that didn't attend recess to see if he was ok.
Richard had a great session today. We completed a task of /th/ in all positions of words in conversation. He was able to correctly produce initial and medial /th/ in conversation with 95% accuracy. Final /th/ was produced correctly 75% of the time but often included self correction, demonstrating great awareness. This session we also began testing with the CELF-5 assessment in order to determine more current goals. We will continue the assessment next session in the areas of reading, reading comprehension and writing.
