Communication Skills

            My focus child has multiple delays and disabilities.  His communication skills is one of the delays he has.  He demonstrated the ability to communicate using words, phrases, and some simple sentences up to 5 to 6 words in length. When he talks he lacks verb endings such as –ing, and eliminates some verbs.   When asking a question instead of saying “Is that my corn?”  He would say “That my corn?”  Another example is when he said “You leave?”  instead of “Are you leaving?”  He tends to miss a lot of verb usage and tense  in each sentence when he talks with anyone.  He has not developed the concept of “Yesterday/today, before/after, and more/less when he communicates with his friends or teachers.  In other words, he needs to enhance his overall receptive and expressive language skills while communicating with others.  He will need to learn how to develop narrative forms, which means stories or explanations that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, (Cook, Klein, and Tessier, p. 261). He is also greatly impacted by his delayed social skills which limits his successes in communicating effectively with others.        

            My approach to enhance his communication strategies would be to walk along with my focus child and encourage him to meet someone and communicate.  I could model for him how to talk based on what he needs from other people or begin modeling basic conversational interactions.  If all the therapist and teachers that work with this child daily encourage and require conversation he will be able to improve his ability to use language more comfortably.  Communicating his wants and needs will be the starting point for out interactions and behavior modeling.

Reference:

Cook, R.E.,M.D. &Tessier, A. (2008).  Adapting early childhood curricula for children with Special Needs (7^th Ed).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall

My Focus Child’s Motor and Self Help Skills

            My focus child has a developmental delay in motor skills.  The delay is in his fine motor skills and he needs to keep working on cutting with scissors, using pencils with a three pinch finger position and he also has mild difficulty using small materials to manipulate. He is able to pick up pencils, crayons, and marker with his hands but could not handle them appropriately in writing and drawing. 

            I learned that “Most fine motor skills, as far as reparation for manual control is concerned, involve hands and fingers” (Cook, Klein, Tessier p. 223).  I knew from the beginning that he has demonstrated fine motor skill problems.  So I discussed with my focus child’s teacher and came up a plan to improve his fine motor skills by providing several papers with lines to cut and the next time I will bring a similar activity except I added simple shapes such as square, triangle, and rectangle to give him a little challenge and develop mathematical concepts.  I am looking for how much improvement he will get by the end of this semester because he has improved since Mid January. 

 Reference:

Cook, R.E., Klein, M.D. & Tessier, A. (2008). Adapting early childhood curricula for children with Special Needs (7^th Ed).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall.

Social Story- Solitary independent play/ turn taking issue.

Social Stories are great implements for helping children.  My focus child has several disabilities and issues such as ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  The story I was telling him encourages him to develop a relationship with other children.

            He has no ability to interact with others because he is totally focused on his on tasks.  However, he also bounces one center t the next for most of center time.  My focus child will begin to play with a toy phone and put it down and walk away after a short time, when his happens another child will pick it up and begin to play with it.  Once my focus child notices someone else has the phone he will begin screaming and screaming.  He walked toward the other child and grabbed it to yank it away but the other child kept holding it even harder.  I stepped in and told my focus child and the other child about “Taking turns”

One kid loved to play basketball.  He was shooting the ball into the goal and made it several times for days.  One day, a child shot the ball and missed the goal.  Another child took the ball and the first child screamed “Hey that is my ball!”  The angry child tried to snatch the ball back but the other child was defending himself by keeping the ball.   The teacher walked into an angry child and the ball snatcher.  The teacher was guiding them by thinking about what can they do to work out the situation.  The children thought about the problem and then the ball snatcher had an idea and told him that he would shot the ball and the angry child while take the ball and shoot also.  “We can take turns!!”  The teacher commended them for working the situation out.

            So my focus child decided to tell him he could have the phone and when he was done then he can have the phone back.  They learned how to take turns and share the phone.  I told them that it was okay to be angry but it was not necessary to shout or be rude to each other.  You must recognize the problem, admit it, and remain calm at all times.