MORE Teach me Language by Dr Freeman and Dake:4 techniques

Here finally is the continuation of the post where I first talked about Dr Freeman's and Dake's  fabulous book "Teach me Language " that the wonderful  M  referred me
Its here on Amazon

This will probably be my last post on "Teach me language" becasue I think I have covered some of the generally applicable things here.

For  more you will need to read the book

Dr Freeman also has a very nice website called "The Autism Pundit".
( I love her slogan "Question Everything . Expect Evidence")

This spring summer these are the 3-4 techniques we - the fabulous trio of Mrs K , Miss S and Mrs G - have been using with a lot of success

The beauty of these tools is that they can be used perennially , they make a ton of sense, they give the language scaffolding and practice that our kids need.

 Finally, they mimic typical language development

For me the most important thing is that we are getting R's own original thoughts and these are priceless

SIMPLE WORD ASSOCIATION  

Why  do we we do this?

The idea is to

1. have the child see and verbalize the relationship between words 

2. develop the ability to answer why questions and to understand the concept of "why-because"    

There are two ways to do simple word association 

WAY 1

Therapist writes down  a word pair

She  asks R to give the reason why they go together.

For example, therapist writes down " green .... sprite " and asks "R why do these words go together "?

 Therpaist introduces a prompt in writing like " "because a ----- is ......."

Once R  figures out the meaning of "is" we will introduce other concepts like tastes , sounds , feels

example therapist writes down "sweet... sprite" or "fizzy.. sprite"   

WAY 2

Therapist suggests a word  : a noun

Example:

Therapist writes down "flight of a bumble bee"  and then asks  child
"R what goes with the flight of a bumble bee?"

When Ro answers "Miss sadie's phone"

Then therapist writes down what R said  and then asks "why do" flight of the bumble bee" and "miss sadie's phone "   go together ?

WHY : the idea is to help the child express his/her ideas without having to frame them in a sentence  this will show the therapist the gaps in the child's general knowledge 

CONTINGENT / TURN TAKING WORD ASSOCIATION 

The therapist begins by saying a word and writes it down.

The child must say a word that is associated with the word and the therapist writes it down.

Then the therapist says a word that is associated with the word and so on    "snow-- january...new year ".

The idea is to complete a whole page  

Here is one made my R and his Miss S

I am enthralled with the  fantastic association R did with monster - "yellow eyes"

 I have fantastic associations that Mrs K and R did - as during this time Mrs K was getting married. She took this opportunity to teach R about weddings and as R went to her wedding - he had many opinions about this :-)

SUGGESTION :

If the child has difficulty completing the whole page then go sentence by sentence

WARNING:
 it may take many times before the child picks this up - persevere .
DO not allow the child to come with the same train of thought over many turns
VARIATION : after the set is complete do the "why do --- and --- go together ?
like this...


 BUILDING ANALOGIES

Take the contingent word sheet and point out the related words and describe the relationship between the two words

Here is one made by R and Mrs G ( those are the initials on the top - this is one clever thing that Mrs G does - by putting his initial on the top - she provides a reminder that its his turn )

Tell me does not the last one make you smile

TALKING ABOUT A TOPIC 

In this the therapist asks the child to choose a topic ( in the example I will show below, "Beach" was the topic R chose)

The therapist then asks the child to talk about the topic

The child gives a few words ( in this case  R chose- Pebbles, Sand, press your toes and Rocky )

Then the therapist uses each of those words to build a sentence and writes it down

In this way, R is expressing his own ideas and Mrs G is helping him turn his ideas into full sentences

This is genius becasue its a window into R's world  - you can see that R experienced the beach in a sensorial way - clearly he expereinced it( I think unpleasantly )  through his feet and it explains why R does not like beaches :-)

 or

If you do nothing else just the writing down of questions and answers has been so great

What I never thought of - is that a guy who does not process well auditarily - does not just miss out on what others say to him but  possibly does not hear what he says himself

In this way, he gets to explain his own true feelings and bargain

Our motto with R has always been First, love and it has served us well

But I think any time we attempt to teach a child our moto has become "First understand and then customize to your child's needs"