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Getting your Child on the Spectrum Ready for the School Year

8/26/2017

The end of the summer can be a stressful time for your child (and for you too). Here are some tips that we have found to work for some of our clients.

Contact your child's school and ask if she or he can take a tour of the school. This is the time of year when teachers are getting their classrooms ready, so your child might even get to meet their teacher!
Take a minute to contact the school psychologist, school counselor, or social worker, as well as any other related service professionals such as speech pathologists as well. Sure, they have all the documentation from your child's district as well as last year's reports. But it would be a good thing for you to meet with them and develop a relationship proactively.
We also recommend that you write a letter about your child and forward it to as many people as possible who will be working with her or him. As was mentioned above, the staff all have the official documentation on your child. But your letter would help have the staff get to know your child better - what his favorite TV shows are or which sounds affect her the worst - and would allow staff to fill in the blanks on your child.
While you are at meeting the school staff, see if you can meet the bus driver and the bus matron as well!
If at all possible, take as many pictures of your child's classroom, lunchroom, gym and other areas. Some staff might be OK with having their picture taken (but many won't and you really can't hold that against them). You can use those pictures to develop social stories, visual schedules or simply have them on his/her tablet for review and to begin conversations about them.
Try to use the week before Labor Day to try get into the sleep routine that will be used when school begins. This would allow your child (and you) to work out a lot of the kinks that might need to be addressed.

What are you doing to deal with the transition back to school? Let us know!

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Delivering Prompts to Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

3/11/2017

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Many parents and professional have asked me about what the best way is to help a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder learn new skills. While there are different methods that are used within the field of applied behavior analysis, prompting is the most commonly used but also the most commonly misused.

Prompting is a way to get a child from responding incorrectly (or partially correctly) to responding correctly. Some of our children often aren't sure of what parts of the environment they should be responding to. Prompts help to highlight what children should respond to as well as when, and how much.

Prompts can be categorized into a hierarchy. At the top level, we have the most intrusive prompts where we are “intruding” on our child’s space maximally; however, we are not allowing our child to make any errors. This is important because, especially since when initially learning a skill, we want our child to experience as much success as possible. We also don't want our child to make an error and then practice the skill incorrectly.

At the bottom level we have the least intrusive prompts where we are “intruding” minimally on our child’s space but leaving the possibility of an error to be made. We typically will implement least intrusive prompts when we are relatively sure that the child will make few to no errors. The table below lists several of the prompts that I and families use while teaching our children.

Generally speaking, I prefer to use a process that is alternately named Most-to-Least Prompt Hierarchy Technique, also known as Errorless Learning, where we begin with the most intrusive prompt and then move down the hierarchy. The first attempt is prompted with the most intrusive prompt appropriate to help the student catch on to the new skill quickly. The first attempt is then followed by a second attempt, using a less intrusive prompt. The second successful, less prompted attempt is then reinforced.

Moving from a more intrusive prompt to a less intrusive prompt is referred to as prompt fading The ultimate goal is for our child to eventually not need any prompts and become independent with the skill at hand. As we watch our child become more awesome at a particular prompt level, the prompt is then faded to a less intrusive prompt. This ensures that the child does not become overly dependent on a particular prompt when learning a new skill.

We really try as much as possible to move as quickly as possible through the prompt levels, but not too quickly. Moving too fast could cause our child to learn the skill incorrectly. In general, we try to make sure that our child is successful with a prompt three to five times in a row before moving on to the next prompt level.

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Getting your Child on the Spectrum Ready for the School Year

Delivering Prompts to Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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