Some new programs for Ivan and Nick

I had therapist sessions with Ivan and Nick yesterday and today. You must have read that they were both doing well at the clinic last month, hence they have some new programs for the therpy.

Ivan has a new program for his behaviour. Normally, he likes to touch anything or open any things that he can reach. He is quite impulsive in a way. So for this program, i'm teaching him to control himself and not get distractors by all the things that surround him. To start with, i just placed something that he like in front of him. However before i started that, i actually preempt him by telling him that i was going to place something in front of him and he was not supposed to touch it for 15 seconds. This is just the beginning for this program, gradually we will start increasing the number of distractors, altering the environment. He was able to stop himself from touching the items that i placed yesterday. Pretty good to start with. You must be wondering why are we teaching him this, what is the function behind this? Basically this is to teach him to control his behaviour as it will be quite destructive sometime if he needs to touch anything that he can find, also we are teaching him to be in focus and not get distracted by other things. This is extremely important as there are lots of things that need attention in order to do it ie sitting for an examination (how is he able to sit for 2 hours if he gets distractor easily, he will most probably not be able to finish his paper)

Another new program is "Recounting events". Ivan tends to get disoriented. He does not really know how to organise events. Sometimes when i was talking to him, the events often got disorganised and i would have no idea whether the event is going to take place or had taken place. He did pretty well for this but still not that solid. I asked him to recall the CDs that we listened to in order. He was able to do so when i laid out the CDs. However when i asked him without laying out the CDs, he was not able to do so. However, i can see that he has improved quite a bit fron the first day i saw him. ABA does help if one uses the right approach=)

As for Nick, i did "Preposition" of on/under. He doesnt really know them so i had to prompt him quite alot by having the word 'on' and 'under' on the chair and under the chair. He was able to put the items on the chair and under the chair with the help of the words. But when i remove both the words, he was not really good at it. So instead of removing both the words, i left one of the word 'on' on the chair, he was good at this and slowly i tried to fade my prompt. Hopefully, he will learn them in few more sessions cause there are so much for him to learn.

I also did "Attributes" big/small as he had mastered wet/dry. He was unsure about this too hence lots of prompting for this program. As one can expect, he was fussing for like 5 minutes during the session mainly because he gets frustrated when he was not able to do something or when he was not able to earn his tokens to have his reinforcer. One more new program under RI (1 step + colour out of chair). I'm suppose to give him instruction and he has to follow and do it ie Can you give me the "red" lego? (There are actually lots of other color and objects that have the same color, hence he needs to listen carefully in order to get the rght one). For this, he has to leave his chair, get it, sit back on his chair and give me the object. He did excellently with this one, smart kid=)