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We had a great meeting with Tyler's teacher and therapists today. We talked about how far Tyler has come this year including his awareness and involvement of what's going on around him, his ability to identify over hundreds of objects, and his signing, etc. He also is so good at waiting now and transitioning to new things. They also gave us a video of the parapro doing probes with him in school so I'll try to get that loaded up soon. We got a lot of good tips for summer as well as working on a few sensory issues we are having at home. I was really happy with the way the meeting went. Here are some specifics:

1) OT, we are gonna work with Tyler on getting him back into the grass with barefeet again this summer. So far this year he's really freaking out. OT suggested we give him lots of deep pressure on his feet before we put him in the grass and then make sure we do something really really fun once he's in the grass to kind of take away from the sensation on his feet until he gets used to it. We are also hoping to find a way to get him interested in the sand this year. We talked about how Tyler avoids certain textures for food (they work on this at food group at school) so we wanted to see what we could do this summer. Tyler has an aversion to spongy/cake like textures so we talked about getting his hands involved in a bunch of spongy type things, maybe I'll play with him in the bathtub with sponges, he loves water so may really like the water squeezing out and that's one way we can get his hands involved in that type of texture.

2) Speech: We spoke a lot about speech today and the balance between Tyler making sounds and signing and how to master signs and hold out for sounds, etc. We also talked about how so many people are involved in Tyler's life and want to help but how hard it is to always communicate what Tyler has learned or what the focus is, etc. and plus you want to make sure to consider that person's natural play style with Tyler and the environment and it's limitations. So we are gonna work on cards for each person that works with Tyler so they have activities/ideas of things to do with Tyler to keep his progress moving forward this summer. We also once again talked about how difficult it is for Tyler to form sounds and that even though he may make a sound or approximate a word one time or in one setting, he may not be able to do it again in another. She reitered that he really struggles to do actions required by his mouth (tips of ways to help this come later)so to make sure we place demands on Tyler that are appropriate for his capabilities. Some of the things we discussed were dad doing a lot of gross motor play which they both love and to really work on sounds for that play and keeping Tyler engaged and wanting to play which is the first steps to communication. We'll be giving daycare a list of activities she can do with books or with group activities and then I'll work on more of the structured verbal behavior type stuff. Working on a schedule of new signs to master and each person will know which signs we are trying to master. He knows many and can do and understand many but he doesn't have them all mastered. They want to ensure that he knows them in many ways, i.e. can he ask for card with a horse on it, can he sign horse to play his horse game with daddy, if he hears "neigh, neigh" will he sign horse, etc. So we talked about ways/ideas to promote all this different type of learning and really grasping each sign we teach him. And then the key is to set up an einvorment where he continually uses the signs he's mastered to make sure they stay in his repertoire. We also talked about oral motor games we can play with Tyler to get those muscles working. Right now he won't really blow when requested and we aren't sure his muscles are strong enough at this point to do so or the connections may not be there yet to know how. So we are gonna work on things that are very fun and easy to do such as breathing into a recorder or harmonica which react to just normal breathing and actual blowing isn't necessary. Basically doing anything we can that promotes the wanting/desire to continue to use those muscles or make sounds. Another idea was when he is making sounds to pat on his back or chest to make a different sound and that new feeling/sound make be reinforcing enough to make him want to make more sounds and that's how words keep flowing. They said it's important for him to be relaxed and having fun cause that's when the words will come flying out so we want to focus on lots of fun things he likes and try to use them to our advantage. Also, as more and more people in our life find out that Tyler has autism and that he can't talk and what that means, etc. I get a lot of questions about speech augmentative speech devices and if we'd ever consider that for Tyler. I can't remember if I ever put this in the blog or not but there was a really cool email on the listservs about this the other day. I think it ws a 7 year old or maybe an 11 year old boy who had autism and could not speak. His mom ended up getting him an iphone (itouch works too) and there is an application for augmentative speech where the boy types what he wants to say and it converts it to language that everyone can hear. He wears it strapped on his arm and it's significantly cheaper than other devices, much lighter and more mobile and as the speech therapist pointed out today, much more "cool".. the last thing you want is a kid with autism is to seem even more dorky that's for sure. So anyway, back to what i was saying. My personal view on it has always been, he's so young, we don't know what the future holds, and I don't want to give him a reason to not have to learn how to speak or not have to learn sign language. Right now he's communicating well, believe it or not, in terms of his degree of autism. he's learning signs very quickly and he is also doing good at eye contact and at gestures and getting your attention and finding a way to get his point across so as long as he has a desire to communicate that way and we give him ways to get his point across, we don't want to augment his speech with technology at this time. It's just not something that we are gonna do for quite some time and by the time we would consider it, we hope he'll be talking:)The speech therapist shared this view, in fact, she wouldn't even give us an age where she'd think it would be appropriate to consider it because we never know what the future holds. I think that was about it for speech.

All and all it was a really good meeting. We are very happy with his progress in school and the way the year went, it actually went by so fast, I can't believe he only has 2 more days of school left!