SALTS and friendly language people: Your tips for teaching object functions and categories please! (receptive speech focussed)

[lingle]

DS2 (3.8, receptive language delay) can now answer the following kinds of questions:

1. "where's DS1?" - answer, "in the sitting room". He has also started to ask "where's mummy?"

1. "what's that?" - pointing to an object or an object in a picture.

1. "do you want X or Y?" "what's your best? X or Y?" (ie which do you prefer?)

He has the following further skills: can carry out commands like "Simon says crawl backwards then jump!" "Simon says kiss the curtain then touch your tummy!" (2-step command with an element of dicrimination in at least one of the steps). He will attempt to process 3-step commands with no discriminations within steps - it's so cute to see him thinking about it. He understands opposites (fascinated by naming the hot and cold taps), finds negatives easy (spontaneously points out that a picture of a cat has "no whiskers!"). He spontaneously attempts to tell me what happened at nursery (it's incomprehensible but sometimes the staff can translate it into "I sat on the ice-cream table!").

I think we are "in the zone" for categories. He spontaneously points out that "mummy's a lady, daddy's a man"- we did not teach him this.
I also think we are in the zone for object functions - DH has had some success pointing at a completed jigsaw of an outdoor scene making requests like "point to the one that's flying".

There is so little material on teaching receptive speech - I would love DS2 to be able to answer questions like "which animal says moo?" (he can answer "what does a cow say?" but that's much much simpler) and "what's your teacher's name?"

Any guidance on suitable targets and techniques would, as ever, be greatly appreciated.

General techniques - I spy games - substitute "begins with" for "something big/sticky/wet/empty/blue" etc. Can be done by reference to a suitable picture book or with toys on the floor.

I was given a lotto board type exercise sheet by private salt - idea being that child places the correct square on the board - in response to a question "find me something you can cut with/cook with/" etc.

e-mail me and we can discuss this further - I think an e-mail from me to you a couple of months ago went astray - with a concept list attached. (milkfloatquack at hotmail dot com)

No tips, but obviously watching this thread like a hawk

bumps for evening

Been thinking about this today Lingle. Have decided that Tuesday afternoons are to be our regular SALT practice sessions as it's the only afternoon when I'm ds2 free.

This afternoon I raided the playroom, dragged out a basket and a load of miscellaneous stuff (food items, transport, little wooden people and animals) and spread it all out on a rug. I then asked ds1 if he could put the food into the basket. I didn't think he was going to respond - (he was initially too interested in playing with his train track and I had to remove it), and then suddenly he did it! He then did the same with the people, the animals and the transport. Hooray! I emptied it out, mixed it up and we did it again. I had to explain to him that the cars, train and plane counted as transport first though, it's not a word we actually use that often.

I'm going to try I Spy next. He's just getting the hang of wet, dry, sticky etc so that will probably be a good one. We can do hard, soft, light, heavy and so on.

I then got out our verb target list and realised that all of a sudden we can tick virtually everything off - he's able to understand them all now, and there's only 4 or 5 he isn't spontaneously using. I think his receptive language has actually improved a little, it's the expressive that's lagging behind a bit now. Will watch this thread with interest!

Lingle, I hope you don't mind me butting into your thread. I used to teach autistic children - everything from potty training to numeracy and spelling.

We would put one thing out, a cow (pic or model) and say "What animal says moo?". There is only one choice so as long as the child indicated it, they were right. When they were consistent, we would then teach another "What animal says quack" with a duck. Once that was consistent (and we would keep doing the cow at another time) we would mix the pair of them - both there so the child had to make a choice. With some children it was a good idea to make some small indication to the right animal the first few times and emphasise the quack or moo to make sure they were hearing the important word.

With categories, we would start easy - have lots of examples of one category and ask them to put them in a container of some sort. When they were OK with that, we would do another category, separately from the first, and then mix the two when the child was consistent with each type. Eventually, we would be at the stage that reducedfatkettlechip has described.

Butt away jux, your input is really interesting. Any ideas what I can do to bring ds1 on further with this? Maybe I could introduce new categories for a start.

Please remember I am not a SALT. Our techniques were very different from the SALTs I saw when they visited 'our' kids. Our techniques worked pretty well with autism, but I have no idea how well they would work with any other children. Also, I have no idea of what sort of stage your children are at, nor what age, nor how they learn. Everything we did was geared towards each individual child and what worked best for them, but the technique was always pretty much the same. Teach one thing, then a second, then differentiation between the two, then introduce a third (by itself), then mix it with the first two etc etc etc. Small steps all the time and lots of reward for getting it right.

But, FWIW:

More categories yes: cutlery, crockery, rooms, buildings, toys, anything you see around you on a regular basis. You can use photos, models or the real things. We had to teach the skill of recognising that a picture of a ball is a ball iyswim, so we had lots of intermediate stages before we could really start on categories.

You can use this technique with pretty well anything you're trying to teach. You can then ask for things like red squares and blue triangles, for example, with some eg. yellow squares & green triangles mixed in.

You had food, transport, animals and people. If there is some way that you can mix these items across the major categories, wooden, green, big (not so easy as it requires comparison) to show that things can be categorised in different ways, big apples, red apples, shiny apples, half-eaten apples etc.

You can extend your requests: can you find the blue wooden ones, the big cars and so on. Use things which are familiar to him, like cutlery or crockery.

You can make your requests different too (this would a whole other ball game when we were working with autistic non-verbal children) so instead of asking for things to go in the basket, you could suggest he puts the animals in the corner, or on the bed etc.

To improve receptive language, you need to extend your 'requests', so you would be saying (eventually!) please put the big plates in the cupboard or please give everyone a knife and fork (at dinner time). Then you need to start using different words, for instance, stack the plates in the cupboard on the left.

Get things into the real world so it becomes truly meaningful.

Lingle - have you seen the ABLLS (Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills)? It's a comprehensive assessment tool which is often used by people doing ABA, but doesn't have to be linked to a behavioural programme. What it does is to break down areas like expressive and receptive language, imitation (motor and verbal), visual skills etc into tiny targets. It's a bit off the point of your OP as it doesn't actually give ideas for how to teach the skill, but it struck me from this post and previous posts of yours that you might find it very useful. It seems very daunting at first, but I find it very useful when assessing where DS2 is at and where to go next. I'll see if I can find a link.

here you go

VB MAPP is effectively next generation ABBLS and will be the tool most widely used over next few years.
Sundberg extremely highly respected in this field. I will be seeing him speak at ABA International conference in Phoenix Arizone in 2 weeks. Can't wait.

Lingle, I'll say it again: ABA great for this stufff.
Sorry, can't post more.Up to ears in MSc proposal.

thanks Jux, that does help. ds1 is 3.8 (same as Lingle's) and has receptive/expressive language delay - poss HFA/lang disorder.

Today I've tried putting out a selection of toys - beds, chairs, tables and asking ds - which one would the doll lie on, sit at etc.

He seemed to have no problem with that, so we moved on to his toy kitchen and I got him to cook an apple in his toy pan with the lid on, and then serve it on a blue plate to me. All while sitting on my hands to avoid pointing and giving him clues. It took some time but we got there!

Going to get his shapes board out now, lots of different coloured wooden shapes, that'll work with the red triangle, green square exercise.

Thanks all, can we share ideas on this please as I've just found out ds' SALT will be on mat leave until December and possibly won't be covered Am on the case but might take some weeks to sort, and I need to keep up the work with him.

Thanks for all the great replies.

DS1 is clearly ready to tackle this stuff but is a lot shakier than kettlecrumb - all a bit hit and miss and I have to give him forced choices (is nana people or an animal?).

You need to have quite a lot of receptive vocabulary for this stuff don't you? DS2 has about 800 active words now so about 1000 receptive but when you look at a picture and choose a question I quite often come up against tricky verbs/nouns he doesn't know.

Kettle, would you be kind enough to email me that verb list? We've about 146 verbs (I know, I'm still counting, it's pathetic but it's a lot cheaper than therapy ) but are only just getting some basic ones like "lose".

How are the pronouns coming along? We've got "I bumped my knee!" now when he falls over which is terrific and reassures my mother to boot. There is a bit of appropriate pronoun swapping. [me: "you did it! him: "yes, I did it!"] but also a fair bit of inappropriate swapping ["do you want to stay here or come with me?" answer: "come with me"] and we've only talking first and second person here. I hope we'll be there on 1st and 2nd person by his birthday in August.

Well the shapes and colours exercise worked a treat. I had 4 different shapes, in 4 different colours, and he identified the correct one every time. Tick.. on to the next of a million exercises I want to try and do!!

Lingle, 146 verbs sounds pretty good to me!! I'm not sure how many we have, but I'd be surprised if it's as high as that, more like 100 I'd guess. There are only about 200 on my whole target list! Lose is a level 3 verb on my list (out of 4) so don't worry too much about that! I only have a printed list of verbs but I can probably scan it and email you (once DH is back on Friday, scanner/printer thing is currently flashing omminously and not sure how to sort it out).

Pronouns are still pretty hopeless tbh, and we have the swapping most of the time. I'd really like to focus on that next as that's a massive obstacle to him sounding a bit more fluent. It's his expressive language that seems to be lagging behind at the moment, I think his receptive language is a bit better than I'd thought.

Ooh! they're on LEVELS!
Ooh Ooh Ooh

They are indeed on levels!!

To give an example, level 1 are things like bang, sit, run, stop

Level 4 are boil, float, teach, shake(?) think, change

If you set off now, you'll be at mine by morning! I'll put the kettle on!!

Oh don't tease me I can't wait till Friday now.......

just a quick thank you to sphil and moondog.

I tend to shy away from attempting to perform the standardised tests on DS2. I could end up doing too much testing......

also to jux these are extremely useful suggestions which I will study.

Sundberg has some free downloads of Powerpoint presentations on various topics of interest. They are pretty comprehensible to intellignet lay person.
Very generous of him to make these available.He is one of the top academics in filed of Verbal Behaviour.

Never a good idea to administer standardises assessments to your own child. I wouldn't and don't.

where would i get these pp presentations ?

On website I've linked to, undeer 'Downloads'

thanks moondog. will take a look.

Ah, we've hit a problem. Ds2 has started taking the mickey out of his earnest parents.

Me: "is doggy an animal? or people?"
Ds2: "people!" DS2 smiles and bursts out laughing.

lingle, if you find a solution to that one, please let me know.

dd1 is the master of this kind of wind up, and revels in giving the wrong answer. At home we try to go along with a joke to an extent, but still expect the right answer.

At school it causes big problems, as dd1 already shuts down a great deal at school, and so they do not see the full extent of her skills anyway. Add in wrong answers (mischivously given, but they do not realise this) and it spells real trouble.

I wish i knew a surefire way to get around it.

Hmm, and presumably it stops being funny after a while?

I think I probably need to decide what I'm doing: naturalistic therapy or SALT-type stuff or ABA-type stuff. DS2 has clearly spotted that I'm asking these questions purely to see if he knows the answer.

Time to reread my Hanen I think. Naturalistic seems to work for us.

Did the DVD reach you ok?

I thought your post on the other thread was brave btw.