Santino was happy throughout today's sessions - he transitioned well from each activity. We have been starting with a book activity for many reasons including attention, following directions, answering questions and vocabulary enhancement. Following that book activity, we targeted verbs(both identifying and naming) with visual support, following directions with fading visual support, answering yes/no questions fading cues, following simple wh questions, requesting, commenting, and protesting. Santino continues to require multimodal cues for reciprocated communication with partner rather than echolalia or scripting from a desired show/video. Attention and eye contact was fleeting today. We use changing his pull up as a skill to work on activities of daily living/following directions. Santino is asked to sequence some of the required tasks with assistance followed by steps to washing hands. He is continuing to improve with this. We worked on some fine motor, writing skills as well today. Occupational therapy evaluation is recommended. Overall, Santino had a good day.
Richard was seen for 60 mins of speech/language therapy. He was happy throughout the session - today was the Halloween party, it gave many opportunities for social/pragmatic situations with peers and others. We targeted irregular past tense verbs both structured and non structured. Richard is very proud of his progress he has made in this area of language skills. Richard continues to require minimal to moderate multimodal cues for /s/ and /s/ blends in the conversational level as well as reducing rate of speech to assist with increased articulatory contact for speech intellgibilibity purposes. Calendar/date was covered as well. Overall, Richard did well this session.
Chris was excited to share his two costumes that he had prepared for the Halloween celebration today at school. He was dressed in his giant chicken costume as the session commenced and then excitedly changed into his Chris-Hollwood TZ shirt, leather jacket, bandana and hat. This afforded the opportunity to expand detail oriented ideas within expanded linguistic sequences.
Several interruptions were noted throughout the session this morning as peers were eager to see each others' costumes and a great deal of commotion was beginning to ensue in the hallway.
Chris was eager to join the morning social greetings.
Chris was excited to share and discuss his recent video that was uploaded to his YouTube site. Expanded conversation to include characters, "story" sequence, and the link or connection to the previous videos within the "series" was the dominant focus this session. Additional topics were shared as Chris was eager to discuss a variety of items that were of importance to him. Reciprocity was supported with familiar cues as topic shifting was rapid this session. Redirection to support topic closure and subsequent topic transition with use of temporal links as needed was highlighted. Expansion to further support the use of novel descriptive phrases to support intention with the focus on continuing to decrease the occurrences of "attention seeking learned utterances." Strong session as motivation and engagement were strong.
Richard was greeted in the lobby at 1:10. He went to McDonald's for lunch however he returned late due to the rain/weather. Richard was happy upon arrival and for the rest of the session. We targeted /s/, /z/, and /s/ blends in conversation at the conversational level. His accuracy was at ~80% and increased overall intelligibility. He reported he will be getting braces Monday so this may temporarily effect speech intelligibility as well. Date/orientation was targeted and Richard stated he filled out the calendar yesterday independently since he didn't have speech with me. This was a great indicator of independence and understanding the concept of days of week/date. Irregular past tense verbs were targeted in a structured task. Richard correctly answered ~50% of these. This is more difficult than regular past tense. Richard was compliant and receptive to all feedback during our session. He is such a pleasure to work with.
Tristan was in a great mood and said that he needed to be outside so he works better. He reminded me of the study I shared with him about how movement can help speech production. So we played basketball while practicing our speech. He was extremely motivated and on task to say 5 words before each shot during a game of horse. There was some schedule confusion about his next class so since he had no where to be, he asked to extend our time. We did a 45 minute session.
Richard was excited to make our Brew live in the kitchen with edible pieces. He was very critical of his recipe and saw room for improvement. More supplies will be brought in the following week to make with other classmates.
Spencer likes to giggle and be silly, so he requested to make another poisonous wizard's brew. This artistic and visual activity allowed him to focus on speech without the written aspect of the sounds. He said he needed a break from that. His strong /r/ sound is coming along and he is even starting to self correct.
