3/23/09

We had a few exciting things happen over the weekend. Attached is a video that shows Ben and Tyler playing together! I kind of caught it at the end so Tyler wasn't nearly as excited as he was when they first started playing it sort of looks like Ben is antognizing Tyler but I promise they were having fun and you can hear Tyler laughing. I recently went through and put batteries in a lot of the toys that hadn't had them for a while. One of them was a dog that Tyler loves. When you push his foot, he barks. Anyway, Tyler still needs someone to push the button for him and since Ben also wanted to play it was a perfect opportunity for me to get them to play together. It was great too cause as soon as Tyler responded to Ben and started giggling and running, Ben was also super excite. Gives me lots of hope for the future... the more we teach Tyler normal social skills, the more Ben is gonna want to play with him and they will reinforce eachother :)


Tyler and I were playing his room another time and went to his crib and kind of threw my hand up. In his crib was a bear and that dog. So I said do you want the bear and signed bear, and then he signed for dog (without being prompted!!!!) yeah! So I obviously gave him the dog. THat was very exciting for me.

We also worked on our "shhhh" sound.. Tickle me elmo was another toy that now has batteries and hasn't for a while. So he's in love with it again and wants me to push Elmo's belly for him. He is happy to sign go but I feel like he has mastered that sign and for the signs he's mastered, I'd realy like to start working on sounds with the signs...so for Elmo we worked on "push".. as I know he can make the "shhh" sound.. it's hard because you have to balance between rewarding the sign (cause that's how he talks) but also holding out for the sounds, you don't want to put the sign on exinction, i.e. signing go no longer gets him what he wants so he stops signing go. Anyway, I'm getting too detailed here... he ended up saying "shhhhh""..... yahoo.. We do the same thing with his bike since the bike is very reinforcing for him and he can't quite reach the petals to do it all himself, he signs go when we stop so we'll push again, we hold out for a sound, any sound at first... but there are many other activities that we continue to reinforce that "go" sign to make sure he continues to use it to communicate with us.

Oh Ben voluntarily told me he loved Tyler the other day, yeah! He said I love miss karen (we were on our way to daycare) so much and I love mommy and I love Ty Ty and I love daddy...aweeee.....

Grandma had fun playing with the boys this weekend and she made some copy of our sign language flash cards so she could start practicing signs at home. Tyler got 3 new signing time videos for his birthday so we are all trying to learn the new signs and work with him on them. Dad printed otu some checklists for us so we can start checking off and tracking what TYler's has learned.. I am gonna separate the cards into mastered, acquired(needs prompting) and then new so that I can do some table time with TYler and make sure I'm using the appropriate amount of new cards with the mastered cards. Since Elmo is rewarding, thinking about using him or the dog as the reinforcer once Tyler goes through a couple of cards. We'll see..hoping to get that all set up and begin this weekend and maybe dad and ben can play u pstairs. Ty seems to be picking up signs fast so I want to continue the momentum and make sure he's picking up new ones and continues to keep the ones he knows as mastered signs.