Mon 16 Jan 2006
I only worked with Tony for a short while today (speech came earlier to play catch up since poor Tony was so sick last week), but he did some pretty cool things. For one, Tony tacted “light”, “snail” (made an approximation), “hole”, and “flag” (also an approximation), all new words. He first echoed these objects while outside but later went back to each one, put his hands on the objects and said the words. Tony also saw a duck and said “duck”, then he made a turkey sound while running up to the animal, thereby scaring the poor creature. With “do this”, Tony clapped, stomped, and drummed his hands. We did very little matching but what we did (matched pictures of cars, boys, and mice) Tony completed correctly. Outside Tony requested “jump”, “swing”, “open”, “walk”, “aah choo”, and “all done”. Tony tacted to “what’s this” outside and he also independently tacted many things, such as alphabet letters, “ball”, and colors. He also said “bye Jill”, and and “hi”. Tony said “cool” a lot, too. We didn’t do a real ABA session today but Tony is really coming along with his speech.
January 17th, 2006 at 10:52 am
We’ve been to Disney and that’s why I’ve fallen a little behind on my blogs (but I’m getting back into behavior analysis mode now). I’m sorry to hear that Tony was sick, but it sounds like you guys still attempted to plug away at some skill development. I’ve noticed two really good indicators through reading the blog, (1) he is picking up novel tacts without formal training, (2) he continues to mand for reinforcers across a variety of motivational conditions. The behavioral literature suggest these are very important indicators for future language development. Continue to utilize good ABA teaching techniques, including prompting, prompt fading, differential reinforcement, and error correction. I will try to remember to demonstrate these across the verbal operants at our next training/program evaluation. BTW, we should probably schedule that.
I will be Chas. this Friday (20th) and could meet from 10:30-12:30…….Anton and Marlaina—just let me know if this works for you guys. If not, we will need to schedule for the week of 1/30 as I will be doing school consultation all next week. Also, we should make the next session into a joint play session with AJ as well……
Take care.
Jay