MANDS = 16

Tony had another great day today. He was very excited to get started with everything and was having fun playing with his new can of noise putty (aka “flarp”). Parker and I worked together on most of the activities and Tony especially liked our game with the ball. We rolled the ball on the floor to each other and Tony manded who would get the ball with “ball Parker” or “ball Tony.” We played this game with Jill before and Tony absolutely loves it. We took this game outside later on and worked on differentiating between “roll” “throw” and “kick.” He got lots of exercise this way.

Back inside we did a lot of work with the dolls and Mr. Potato Head. He hasn’t had too much interest in these things but since he hasn’t interated with either of these things lately, Tony seemed happy to start play. We went through motor imitation and receptives and also slipped in some echoics. He’s really improving his approximations with colors. “Orange” is becoming very clear and “open door” is almost perfect now. The past few weeks Tony has had so much growth with his verbal abilities.

Another fun thing we’ve been doing is “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” This is targeted in Phase 2 under intraverbals. Tony is averaging pretty close to perfect with all of the gestures. Interactive music like this is very reinforcing for him so I’m happy it can be worked into the program as a learning tool.

Jay, Parker had a good question for me today and I wasn’t quite sure how to answer it myself. For the prepositions, should we be collecting data separately for each one. For example “over” and “under” if Tony only gets one of them correct, how should we record it?

Alright, I think that’s all for today. I just want to say I am so proud of Tony and how hard he’s trying. He’s really making tremendous progress!