Northern Speech Services, Inc.

In December, I went to a very interesting and informative conference given by Northern Speech Services, Inc. The woman who spoke is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and a Speech Pathalogist. Her name is Tamara S. Kasper and she runs an ABA autism clinic in Wisconsin.

The confernece focused on motivating children with autism to speak: incorportating the principles of ABA to build functional communication. I am not going to explain everything that was discussed, but give an outline of highlighted information that was given.

A main goal is to have your child with autism communicate. Tamara talked about manding as the first thing focused on. Manding is the request for wanted items before item is in his or her own hands. I asked her a question which was, If you jsut meet a child just diagnosed what percentage of a therapy session is geared toward manding? Her answer was the entire time until your child can mand for at least ten items. Understand a mand can be verbal, signed, or pecs and should be done using activities your child is motivated by. Tamara focused on signing to get verbal. Just a little tip for parents that are just starting out. She says this so your child can become comfortable with his or her therapists and your child learns to trust you and you build a repore with one another.

Motivation and reinforcers are very improtant to your learner and if the mo ( motivation) gets killed your child will not have the desire to learn. It is important to a have a variety of reinforcers to switch around. I have also fould hig fives and tickles very reinforcing to the children I teach.

Also talked about was teaching procedures. Use transfer trials whenever a prompt is necessary, whether it is a less prompted or independent trial. Also use extinction for problem behavior when needed. Another important procedure is to teach skills until fluent and mix and vary what types of skills are being taught. For example, if you are teaching an imitation skill which uses the sd" do this" of clap hands and wave , and Id of objects car and ball, make sure you do one imitation then one Id of objects so your child does not know what to expect. It helps discriminate between stimuli.

There was so many good topics talked about at this Northern Speech Services, Inc. conference that It would take too long to write about. I just want to point out that Tamara gave great presentation went into detail about the topics covered and spoke about the importance of how children with autism learn the best, which is also researched based.

I feel it is important to share with you conferences that I found extremely helpful and please share with us ones that you found informative as well.

If you are interested in learning more about other seminars Northern Speech Services, Inc. presents goto www.northernspeech.com.

Informative Seminar given by Northern Speech Services, Inc.