ABA yes or no?

[adrianna22]

Hi

DS if four, has a severe language delay and has autism.

Ever since reading 'Let me hear your voice' by Catherine (forgot her surname), I have always wondered if ABA is something that I should try on DS.

I have looked at the 'more than words book' but not finding it helpful at the moment, except for the bit about play skills, as DS..how can I say it? in terms of his autism, has not got that far yet.

DS does have the basis of communication, e.g.. pointing, joint attention, sharing interests etc. He main strength is his understanding and use of nominal and conventional gestures, he even has his own made-up sign language. .

Though it seems that DS understanding lots of things but for some reason the words are not coming out.

He has been in speech therapy for the past two years, which has helped, but very slow progress. However, to be fair, I did not continuously work on DS with things that the speech therapist assign me to do, due to being in denial, hoping he would catch up, not motivated enough, worrying what DS may have instead of spending my time working on him. Which I do admit is wrong. So guessing I need to work more on DS to see if it is helping him.

As when DS gets into school, I'm thinking of hiring a private therapist, which could be either a speech therapist or ABA. I want to hire a therapist who will help DS expand and develop with his use of natural gestures, joint attention, play skills etc, but at the same time get in to talk.

Obviously with ABA I have heard some bad things about it, but mainly good things as well. Would ABA be appropriate for my DS?

I would like to hear a comparison view of ABA.

JUST TO ADD. I am aware that ABA consists of having 20/week sessions per week?? The issue is, I will not be able to afford that much at all!! When considering hiring a speech therapist, I was going to do three times a month.

What shall I do?

Thanks .

The letter board app dd1 uses is Word Wizard. It has word lists built in too, but she only uses the free board part of it.

Spe with Pip is a good app, but gets difficult very quickly.

Sorry, that should be Spell with Pip. Fat fingers!

now i'm not sure dd1 has done RWI after all! I'll have to check her IEP/progress report. That doesn't sound familiar at all...

The writing key objectives summary for the National Curriculum

Thank you Lougle. That gives me a great starting point though will have to research what most of it actually means. e.g. graphemes etc.

Graphemes are just the letters that represent sounds. E.g. 'ow' is the grapheme for the sound 'ow' in cow, brown, etc., just as 'ou' is the grapheme for the same sound in 'shout' and 'out'.

Phonemes are the sounds represented by letters. So the word 'high' has two phonemes (sounds) 'h' (represented by letter h) and 'i' (represented by the letters 'igh').

Here's a good document which explains phonics www.dropbox.com/s/9rkspj6bpxwlnqo/attachment.doc

Zzzzz, they say that 80% of children can learn using mixed methods, but their concern is that unless a child understands phonics they can't effectively learn to decode quickly and fluently.

DD1 seemed to be a sight reader for a good while and took years to learn 36 words. Now she's started to grasp phonics she's telling me how to spell words.

I think you're right, zzzzz, but I don't think what you're saying contradicts the current thinking in phonics.

Phonics is about being able to come across new/unfamiliar words and decode, then blend, the phonemes to read the word. Once a word has been successfully decoded to the point of fluency (or mastery in ABA speak), the individual no longer goes through that process consciously each time they come across that word. It has been committed to memory and is recalled. However, without phonic knowledge, an individual doesn't have the tools they need to break an unfamiliar word down and work out what it is saying.

My DH is a pretty extreme example of this. I can't use the age old trick of saying, for example, 'shall we go to the p-a-r-k?' in front of the children because he literally can't process p-a-r-k unless he closes his eyes and visualises the word. Even 'c-a-r' Would see him closing his eyes to visualise. That's because he learned to read by whole word recognition. His spelling is dreadful because he can't hear the sounds in words so he doesn't know how to break a word down into its parts and he doesn't know the various options for spelling those sounds.

Phonics isn't intended to be used by fluent readers in every day reading of texts. I'm not sitting here saying the sounds, then blending them. The intention is that sounds are learned, they are blended, then words are read fluently. The key, though, is that a person can then read any word they come across because they can break it down. DH reads Game of Thrones and he has to stop frequently to ask me how a certain word is pronounced. That really spoils the books for him and he gets frustrated because he's a very slow reader as a result.

I was taught to sight read. I also need to visualise if someone spells something out. I can blend though, somehow.

What confuses me is how you teach that ow is as in cow and as in low. I always believed it was the same sound just adjusted naturally for efficiency. Same with look and boot, but then I grew up with the Lancashire dialect.

zzzzz I think we are saying the same thing but getting lost in translation

"I don't think we learn to decode (sound out) faster and faster and so need to learn to do it at lightning speed (though many do)"

You're absolutely right. Once the sound has been learned fluently, then that sound can be used fluently to sound out new or unfamiliar words. Once we have seen the word several times, that word gets committed to our memory and we then use sight reading to recognise it and read it without being conscious of having done so.

However, for the reading of unfamiliar text, we need the tools to work out what a word is, which is where phonics comes in.

Star

"What confuses me is how you teach that ow is as in cow and as in low."

The sound is taught, and then the way that sound can be written is taught. So the /ow/ sound can be spelt 'ow' or 'ou'. the /o/ sound can be spelt 'o' or 'ow'.

I see. Surely there must be a list of all these sounds somewhere? There is no way I woukd work them out.

That is what I thought RWI might help me with. Is there an app?

My Dad used to make me identify the 7 sounds of 'ough' as punishment.

amazon has all the RWI resources but phonics is phonics -the sounds don't change!

We have the flashcards, which are ideal for SAFMEDS.

For the OP: a decent, cheap teach-yourself ABA package is £69

For star re spellings: ds was similar, and the (then) teacher said not to worry about 'learning' the spellings. Advice was just make him read LOADS (so he'd see the correct spellings a lot) and encourage supervised practice writing the tricky words in his best joined-up writing.

We managed plenty of the first suggestion, with the aid of various screen devices. but not much of the second. Still worked though!

"encourage supervised practice writing the tricky words in his best joined-up writing."

DD2's school didn't do spelling tests. They said latest research is that it does no good, and the best way to embed it is to use it in sentences. So they used to write 4 words that the child had misspelled frequently in a table, and the child was given homework to write a sentence for each word, that contained it.