MANDS = 18

I took over for Parker today for Tony’s ABA since she wasn’t feeling well. Tony was having kind of a rough day with things. He seemed frustrated with a lot of the activities…although he still willingly completed almost everything. However he’s in with Jill right now having speech and he seems to be enjoying himself with balloons.

Some exciting news to report on receptives. While we were working on Mr. Potato Head Tony started tacting all of his parts and then started tacting his own corresponding parts accordingly. Tony put Mr. Tato Head’s nose and mouth in the correct place and then said “nose” “mouth” very clearly and then touched his own nose and mouth immediately after. This is the first time I’ve seen him make such a clear connection with the Potato Head parts and his own. This is definitely good!

OK, other things for today we did….we did some good work with the intraverbals. I’m still getting a lot of approximations for “notebook” and “crayon.” Notebook is more like “nok-kk” and crayon is still “crayy” for the most part. I think these will get better as everyone continues to reinforce him with the full and correct echoic promt. I also heard Tony say “cup” very clearly several times (not just the “ccc”).

Another fantastic thing that Tony did today was say “PLay-Dough” for the first time with no prompt (well just the visual). I got the dough down and said “Hey, what’s this?” At first Tony said “squeeze” I paused another few seconds before giving him a prompt and then Tony turned around and said “play-dough.” I reinforced him with the play-dough and kept repeating the phrase during our playtime with it. How great is this kid?

We spent a lot of time this session going over colors and adjectives big/little and long/short. I still feel like we’re in the beginning teaching phase with these things especially with big/little and long/short simply because Tony has never said any of these words before. I give him a lot of echoic promts like “say long” and then I’ll make the slinky long. Then I’ll say, “Lets make the slinky short. Can you say short?” This is how I’ve been doing it…I’ve also been using string and those colored tubes that make noise when you make them long/short. I’ve also been using any opportunity during our playtime to incorporate teaching colors by having Tony mand for objects of a certain color. I’ll talk more about these things with you tomorrow Jay. I really think he’s doing well though.

Ok, I think that’s all for today. Tony just got done having a blast in speech so I think its time for nap!