This PowerPoint has everything you'll need to provide your class or children with some fun word games for kids. Once you have the more detailed progression to look at, you can begin to apply the intervention techniques to your own child…and begin to see that natural language acquisition does take place in children on the spectrum! By our fourth month, Dylan was mitigating routinely. He used, “I got it!” (a modeled gestalt), but also changed it to “We got it!. During a paper-cutting activity, Dylan produced all of the following:

A powerful account of one father’s journey through unimaginable grief, offering readers a new vision for how to more actively and fully mourn profound loss.A few months later, Dylan still had a few Stage 3 constructions, but was more solidly at Stages 4 and 5. Typical utterances included: These findings were revealing and quite surprising to an autism community that had thought that “echoing” was a non-meaningful and even disturbing characteristic of autism. While historically, linguistics and language development literature have contained numerous references to gestalt language processing (variously referred to as “formulaic”, “intonational”, etc.) as a part of normal language acquisition, its everyday application to kids with ASD has not been widespread. We first met Dylan at his home, and played with him in our clinic the following week, recording everything he said during that second meeting. Most of what Dylan said was unintelligible to us, although his mother knew much of it, and even which video it came from. Long strings of vague sounds representing multiple sentences such as, “Let’s go find him come on Spot now let me think where are you” made up the bulk of Dylan’s verbal output. Other, shorter comments like, “Where’s the snowball?” were easier for us to understand, but still confusing on this early fall, snow-free, day. Many of us worry about speaking to our GP if we’re struggling with any health problem. When it comes to talking about our mental health, it can be harder still. But bottling things up can make things worse. It’s better to ask for help earlier on. That way, if needed, you can start receiving the treatment you need to set you on the road to recovery.

Quotes [ ] Jimmy: I'm telling you the truth. I'm their father. Carl: News flash, buddy boy. Their father is dead. He was killed in the Korean War. Now, we recognize echolalia as a part of a picture of ASD, and we tend to include it in our descriptions of our kids. Unfortunately, however, we don’t really seem to know what to do with it! We all but ignore it when we are with our kids, silently hoping it will just stop. In the meantime, we usually try hard to replace our kids’ language “gestalts” with more typical-sounding language, using phrases that sound more “normal.” With variable success, we have taught our kids vocabulary words and scripted sentences that they can access on their own – sometimes only after years of prompting and drills in generalization. Another eight months later, Dylan’s language was a mixture of Stages 4, 5, and Stage 6 (DSS levels 7 and 8), with constructions such as the following:

I asked about some of the things Will used to recite, and if he sometimes still did, outside of his therapies. Sally thought for several seconds, and said, “Yes.” She and her husband even thought that some of the lines made sense in a funny kind of way, and she gave me a few examples. Once recently, Will had said to his father, “Sent from heaven up above, here’s a baby for you to love.” Sally explained that this was a line from the movie, Dumbo. She continued that Will’s father laughed when he heard the line, and thought it was clever of Will to remember such a long, complicated sentence. Sally, too, was proud of her son for expressing himself in such a poetic, if unconventional, way. Mom! Spike is talking!” announced Bevin, referring to the previously speechless dinosaur in the movie, Land Before Time. “Yes,” his mother said, “And we’re so happy.” When Bevin continued, “Mom! Spike says more words,” his mother reiterated, “We’re so happy!” But Bevin persisted, “Mom! Spike can talk!” “Really?” laughed his mother, pleased with Bevin’s pride in “Spike,” who clearly represented her son. Then Bevin added his own twist, “…when he wants to!” A group of people with life-limiting conditions, and those who have experienced the death of a loved person, came together to discuss their involvement with people who had the task of supporting those approaching the end of life. I went to my GP in Ealing in November 2014 to talk about feeling depressed and he was absolutely fantastic. I initially made the appointment to discuss an ear infection, but when he asked how I was feeling I just broke down and told him everything." This one example shows how, with older children, even without a history of support in natural language acquisition, the stages of the process can occur. That all the stages are happening at once with Will is confusing, to be sure. But we overcome that by writing it all down (Will’s mother is our most reliable scribe). If we don’t know where a gestalt comes from, she and Will do. Then we speculate about its current usefulness to Will. We can then respond conversationally, often giving Will a more “transparent” (common) gestalt as his next language model.

The animation and language of movies make them a hard act to follow. Fortunately, real life provides the motor experiences our kids crave, and people who know how to make them fun! Our play had to be active and exciting, and our language had to be delivered with enthusiasm and all the theatrics we could muster. Predictable, “transparent,” developmentally appropriate language can be deadly-dull, unless we make it otherwise! We wanted to compete successfully with Hollywood, so we created extremely fun, movement-based experiences (think, “sensory integration”), that just happened to include basic sentence forms like, “Let’s…”, “Hey, it’s…”, etc. Somehow we did it, because a few months later, Dylan routinely extracted these types of phrases from our language, and produced his own recombinations!Despite Harriette and Rachel's father returning to their lives after nearly 40 years, promising to be there now for them, he never appears in the series again. With this PowerPoint, you can play fun literacy-based games where children see how many words they can make from the letters given. The longer the word, the more points are awarded.