Chris was eager to share ideas using the "Procreate" art APP and his new stylus. He provided detail and character trait description across all 6 characters that he had created. Conversational expansion that followed highlighted the familiar dynamics of listener perspective and self awareness. Chris was extremely motivated to further discuss aspects of "focus" through use of both question and comment. Topic expansion included the metalinguistic and metacognitive aspects of "Talking about talking," and " Thinking and talking about thinking." Chris was extremely proud to share that he is "better at changing the subject now." He is able to better recognize his own attentional shifts and utilize more successful language strategies to support his intention.
Strong session today.
Chris was eager to share the plush toys that he had brought with him today, as well as a new collection of "Sonic" figurines that he had just acquired. This afforded an opportunity to expand upon detailed character traits and aspects of role playing. Chris was highly motivated this session to further expand the ideas for his new "YouTube" stories. Strong supports were provided to assist with organization of ideas, story line sequences, and perspective taking within the dynamic of conversation. Topic shifts were supported by use of increased and varied "starters" this session as Chris transitioned between topic ideas. Strong motivation to review target /s/ phoneme production was noted this session.
Chris was excited to share a few pictures from the airplane flight home from New York. This afforded an opportunity to expand into conversation involving strong aspects of recall and linear organization of detail. Scaffolding supports were provided to assist with use of temporal links and cohesive ties. Topic shifting was noted to increase as linguistic demand was heightened. Familiar supports were provided to assist Chris with successful topic shifting and subsequent sustaining of conversational exchange. Aspects of perspective taking and presupposition were once more highlighted, as was the dynamic of "novel language" use and the use of "previously learned phrases" within an exchange.
Santino was greeted as he finished his previous class. He has reportedly been requesting to eat with Ms. Barbara, which is great, of course, but he does want a snack right before feeding therapy. She states he only eats a small amount of a snack. Today was a great day. I primarily targeted generalizing the skill to requesting using longer utterance length. Santino has been requesting to go outside/inside/take a walk. There are a few requests he will use "I want to go ___". In addition, we started to carry it over to other situations during playing games, playing on the playground and other activities. Santino has been responding well to pause time, allowing him to process the request verbally. We played a game called Zingo which is similar to bingo with turn taking and putting chips on the board. Santino really enjoyed this game and was engaged. We worked on using longer sentences with requesting turns and pieces. It was a good session for Santino, I'm happy to see he is carrying over his progress in multiple settings.
Today's session was productive and targeted many of the same goals we are continuing to make progress toward. Santino was greeted in the classroom and we started doing an activity on the computer with BOOM cards. This is a great interactive app that can target whatever goals/skill you are working on. Today we did verb boom cards with "climbing, sliding, and swinging". This was fun since we have been working on using language on the playground more with frequent auditory bombardment paired with action. Santino was naming the picture given a choice of three with ~60% accuracy. During this, we also targeted expanding his utterance length (i.e. climbing the ladder, sliding down the slide, etc.). Santino was requesting to go on the playground and he was saying "playground" over and over - given an adequate amount of pause time, Santino demonstrated motor planning/processing and independently requested "I want to go playground". He used this request a few times during session - pause time is very beneficial with him to process the sentence structure. We continue to work on using his name when asked and greeting others when he is greeted.
Richard was greeted in his classroom as he had on his Pikachu blow up costume on. He was happy to show me this however was asked to put in on at recess so it wasn't a distraction. Richard was more distracted today - more than usual. It may be due to his excitement for his birthday tomorrow. He required frequent prompts and cues to remain focused or stay on task. Verbalizing his thoughts was disorganized. He also required cues to remain on topic for an appropriate period of time. Richard benefits from verbal cues to remain on topic, respond appropriately to social interactions, etc. We targeted /th/ in both initial and medial position today - medial being more difficult. Richard generates sentences with a given word to increase complexity. Richard is at ~65% accuracy given minimal cues. We covered the month/calendar. We completed an auxiliary verb task (unstructured task). Lastly, we worked on past tense verbs and using the correct tense. Richard is beginning to demonstrate the understanding once prompted (i.e. "oh is it eat or ate?" and he will respond with "oh, he ate").
Chris was eager to initiate conversation this session by "sharing his hopes and dreams" regarding upcoming story lines within the "Marvel Universe." Chris had strong intention to share detailed scenarios that were clearly important to him. Allowance for reciprocity was supported with question stimuli, as well as to assist in clarification of ideas. Aspects of perspective taking, and focus on interpretation of facial and gestural cues was revisited this session to further support successful monologue organization and to assist with expanded reciprocity. Attentional shifting was supported with familiar cues and supports.
What a fun day for Santino! Today he participated in the Easter egg hunt they had at school (pictures sent to mom). This was a FANTASTIC activity to target so many goals including following directions, peer to peer interactions, sustained attention, eye contact, using longer utterance lengths, using different forms of language (verbs, pronouns, adjectives, etc). This was a very interactive and fun activity that covered many goals. At the end, he earned two toys from the egg hunt which he was excited about as well. We changed his diaper which is becoming faster for him however still required a lot of prompting. We also did a book and playdoh activity working on requesting/using "can I have it", "I want __" before grabbing out of my hands for desired objects.
Santino was greeted around 12:15pm when he got to school. Santino greeted me with "Ms. Amanda". We are working on "Hi Ms. Amanda" or "hi" independently. We have been working on the same goals as stated in the last few months, making progress in many. Santino benefits from modeling/verbal prompting to increase overall utterance length. His requests have been functional however typically using one word to request "playground", "trains", "book", etc. I am working on expanding this to "I want.... +verb + desired activity/place/object". When cued with "I...." Santino did finish with "I want to go playground". We targeted verbs with a book activity. Auditory bombardment during play outside - including commenting and requesting. Social interaction skills are also targeted during play outside. Using verbs and adjectives during a train activity was fun and required moderate multimodal cues.
