Tue 20 Dec 2005
Today was a little unusual because Marlaina and Anton had a photo shoot and couldn’t be at home during therapy. I was also sick with a fresh cold today so needless to say we didn’t do a whole lot. We did do “do this” with stomp and also “head, shoulders, knees and toes.” I mainly did tacting with 3-D objects like “book” and “ball.” When Tony’s movie ended and he started to whine I tried the sign for “movie.” So are we doing TV or movie?
Tony was also making lots of requests for tickles with signs and verbalization. Jill came at 1:00 and since we had been playing with the Play-Dough she dove right in and started with “roll” and “ball” making shapes with the dough. He was in a pretty good mood considering the absence of mom and dada. Jill also worked with him on sounds of animals and also did some gross motor imitation activities. I hope to get a full session in on Thursday before we all take a break for the holidays.
December 21st, 2005 at 12:01 pm
I’m sorry to hear about the sickness going around there. I hope everybody gets better before Christmas. We will reschedule the ABA training for early Jan.
Anton had asked me about the counter this morning. I planned on explaining in more detail at today’s training, but here’s the short and skinny of it. We need to establish a measure of Tony’s language acquistion (in addition to cold probe data collected) and counting prompted and unprompted mands is one way to accomplish this. Therefore, I’d like for ABA therapists to begin counting the number of mands (prompted and unprompted) during their sessions with Tony. No, you don’t have to count separately “prompted” and “unprompted”. Just click the counter every time you clearly observe Tony manding for an item, activity, etc. (whether prompted or unprompted). If it’s not a clear mand and you deliver what you think he wants, and he throws it down (doesn’t want it), do not count as mand. Remember, with manding, the antecedent is Tony’s desire or motivation for a particular reinforcer, the behavior is manding, and the consequence is the item or activity that was requested. This is different from tacting, interverbals, MTS, imitation, echoics, etc. where antecedents and consequences are functionally different (although the response form may actually be identical to the mand). For example, “car” may be an echoic in one situation, a “tact” in another, a mand, etc. You must distinguish these responses based on the antecedents/consequences to the response.
Keep track of the mand number each session and we will graph these data soon.
If you have questions, post here or e-mail me. Have a great holiday season!
Jay