ABA
Teaching Ideas
Fluency Sprints and Maintenance- rotation
Put your fluency sprints and maintenance on rotation. Practiced ones on the back. This will avoid need for long data sheets and writing of dates.
Mixed Trials
Make your mixed trials more efficient by coding cards and velcroing cards together so you can do discrimination and maintenance of 'another' and 'different. It will be much easier to remember maintenance of feature, function, class, and other programs with codes. It works well for our team. Take the load of your shoulders... Why remember it all (plus everything else) when you can simply prompt yourself.
Admin ideas for your home program
Please note that there are links to other websites on this page
Mastery criteria for index cards
Colour coding index cards
A really good way to organise programs and targets from the different skill areas.
Teaching appropriate play in a decluttered environment
Teaching appropriate play in a decluttered environment
We have put all activities available to my son on photo cards which now facilitates rotation. In order to keep the toy sets together, I've stored them separately in boxes. Only a few stay in the therapy room, including toys that are highly reinforcing to him. A lot of the boxes are stored in a different room and we use them as we need them. This system has helped as I now only rotate highly reinforcing toys, but we use the kits as part of our structured session and it saves time too. Some of the boxes I use are from IKEA. They have wheels and can be stored on top of each other in a corner of a room. They hardly take any space.
I store them at a safe height and label them to make it easier for therapists to find them.
http://m.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/art/80098516/
http://m.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/spr/49871676/
Tips on laminating and best prices for stationery
Why laminate your flash cards?
If you haven't done it yet, think again!
Using photo paper and harder paper stops them being stuck on the roller inside your laminator. If you are a UK resident, you can buy cheap packs from bargain shops such as 'Home Bargains' the 'WHAT' shop and 'Pound Land'. I only use 'Staples' or 'WHSmith' for the 160msg paper which goes through the laminator nicely and is twice the thickness of a normal A4 sheet. Laminators are usually cheap to buy from bargain shops and supermarkets.
I but photo paper @ 79p for 15 sheets and laminating pouches @ 99p for 25 sheets.
I get my 160msg paper from Staples. It prints and laminates nicely. Good quality flash cards are helpful to our kids.
Make sure you adjust your printer settings to Photo paper (A4 sheet). More on flash cards in the next post.
How much of our time is spent on producing picture flash cards?
We know how important picture flash cards are to our kids. They need these visual aids in order to build the so much needed banks of information in their brain, alongside generalisation into living age appropriate experiences including vocabulary they're learning, tacting items from the natural environment and objects.
I have personally reverted to producing my own as I've found that shop bought pictures are not always specific to my child's needs. However, there are many good sites selling excellent picture flash cards, like the Early leaning centre.
I use the Flash Pro3 software to produce them at home. It is ABA/autism specific and it contains thousands of pictures divided into different categories. On the practical side, it automatically places the photos on an A4 size sheet, lined to aid cutting them up. It also offers different printing sizes.
I take my own photos and create personal folders with it as well (e.g. My son's routine for sequencing, his favourite toys and familiar people).
Are you struggling to find resources in your therapy room?
What happens with your child's teaching resources after tutors go home, when your toddler is around or when siblings' friends come to play.
It is hard for some families to lock the therapy room after sessions but if your team is spending too much time looking for resources it will impact on our child's session. Most of our kids need constant attention and structure in order to remain engaged. Have a look at what is slowing you down as a team and discuss solutions together.
You can start tidying up slowly and once it is done you will see a huge difference. Teaching materials are a NO GO zone in our house and it's worth putting them on a high shelf after sessions or using drawer locks if you have a toddler. As we have put our toys in kits, my daughter's friends like playing with them and they've learnt to put them back before they play with the next one.
If you don't have much time to tidy up you can start by putting in a black bag all the toys that your child does not play with often or never and leaving in the room just the most reinforcing toys and teaching materials. Leave the bags in the garage and you can go through them when you get time.
I've put all the different kits together (shopping, zoo, airport) and left everything else in the garage. Birthdays have come and gone and my bags remained in the garage for a long time. No one missed them and they are now only useful when we are looking for resources for new programs.
Rotation of mastered flash cards
As the amount of mastered flash cards grow, it is important to make sure the team will work on them all systematically. Mastered flash cards Include receptive and tact (labelling) programs.
It is a good idea to have the flash cards in easy reach to save time. I've created this system to help therapists manage the rotation of the cards as a team. We also date the top drawer on the day we start using it so we can keep track of how long we are working on each specific drawer as a team. There's no pressure to do a set number of cards as there are other priorities sometimes but we set a realistic goal of a minimum of 50 per day so we keep up with maintenance.
This has worked well in my program. As the amount of drawers grow you can either remove the first drawers eg numbers 1 and 2 and add in numbers 5 and 6. I don't tend to remove the very easy cards as they aid teaching acquisition.
I don't leave all the drawers in the room. My office has become somewhat an extension of my son's therapy room where I archive surplus materials.
How do you do your mixed trials? Could this work for you?
General behaviour and communication books
I have plans and clever tricks! A smart little boy has managed to get the chocolate cereal whilst mum was asking the therapist a quick question. Sounds familiar?
Most of our kids need full on one to one support to remain engaged and safe throughout the session. If you have something that can't wait then it is a good idea to make sure your child is safe first, rather than worry whilst you talk.
There's also always the risk of you interrupting when your therapist is probing data which will affect your child's focus and the flow of the session.
For non urgent queries, it is good to maintain a communication system that can reach all therapists, so you so not have to repeat the information several times. We use two different books: a general behaviour book (where therapists write a brief update on the session daily) and a communications book (where we write technical queries and information to each other). These are looked at on a daily basis. I update the paperwork myself and produce a weekly update for my tutors which I put on the communications book.
You can also speak to tutors at the start or end of their session. Remember that your child's time with them is much more important than yours. Try and keep it brief.
I need to remember this on a daily basis myself.
Wi-fi camera
Struggling with a small therapy room during workshops? Try a wi-fi camera as you will be able to watch from another room at workshops. Some children perform better with less people in the room too. There are wi-fi cameras at a reasonable cost so look around before purchasing.
Resource boxes for demonstrating actions, actions in vivo, feature, function and class
We use objects to teach actions in vivo, feature, function and adjectives, amongst others. Once these are mastered we move on to pictures but still need to keep up with maintenance of objects until it has been permanently mastered.
I keep the separate resources into their correspondent boxes and they are useful to probe new programs as well. No more running around at the last minute!
Reproducing replicas of taught targets
I save my templates electronically and print all replicas at once, double sided, with mastered date, sd and any observation on the back of cards for therapists to refer to during maintenance if they need.
Mixed Trial codes- Videos displaying Sds being used
I have tried to demonstrate to you all in a practical way how you can use the codes in the picture during a mixed trial. I am using the Sds one after the other and this is not how we usually do mixed trials with my son. We tend to mix cards at the table and use mixed trials with mastered flash cards to teach acquisition targets as well as do maintenance daily.
Please note that I am not teaching you how to do mixed trials with these videos but just demonstrating how the codes can prompt you to use the correct Sds when flash cards come up, rather than turning cards over to check the back of them. Our mixed trials became a lot quicker and more efficient after this system was put in place.
Your ABA consultant will be able to establish the best way for your team to do mixed trials in your child's program, how many flash cards at a time you need to put on the table and if they will be done together with acquisition targets, one at a time, etc. Each ABA program is unique to a child’s needs and one rule doesn’t always apply to all children.
I hope that the code on the picture is clearer to you after you watch the videos. Pay attention to the videos and notice that the therapist is guided by the codes on the pictures as they come up. The more obvious ones do not need a code (e.g. labeling items, colours, numbers, phonics). We use the codes for class categories (e.g. letters, clothes), function (e.g. drive, eat, bounce), feature (e.g. parts of things), actions in pictures, sounds (e.g. animal or vehicles) and we make have made up new codes as we have needed them.
It is important to make sure that the number of codes stays realistic and that you practice one before you add the next one. When you get to the point where you are extending language and start writing sentences on the cards, some codes will become obsolete. Codes are, however, great help when you are working in one words or teaching without reading as a prompt.
When we put the code in place, therapists took home a codes mixed trial pack so they could practice on their friends and they really enjoyed it! This works so well in our program!
Resources organiser, idea from Apple Maple (parent)
Ikea shoe organiser - at £4.50 this is such an amazing product to organise all the petty things like flash cards, pattern blocks, math counters, stationeries and what not! And it consumes absolutely no space! I have fallen in love with this organiser :)
