He can request things he wants, saying ‘I want Dumbo,’ or ‘I want skiing’. He can also take a scripted turn like, ‘I like St. Louis Cardinals. Do you like St. Louis Cardinals?’ Will’s mother, Sally, continued that she wanted to see if we could work on Will’s sentence structure, to see if he could learn to say other sentences without prompting. Her ABA therapists had done all they could, she said, and talking seemed to be what Will needed the most help with. So, let’s return to Dylan’s story. When he had been in therapy for a little over a year, his use of generative grammar had been at Stage 4 for a few months. A language sample at that time revealed Stage 4 constructions (Developmental Sentence Scoring levels 1-3) such as the following, and a few Stage 5 constructions (DSS levels 4-6):

The rules for playing each Word Scramble game are slightly different, but most rely on the same core instructions. Players are given random tiles or scrambled letters, and they are asked to rearrange the letters or tiles into words. Word Scramble and Word Jumble games can be tough but they're great for your brain and also a lot of fun! Extra ToolsDon’t be afraid to swap out your tiles when necessary. Sometimes it’s the only way to stay in the game. We were delighted, though, because we knew that the progression from “Let’s play with the monsters” to “I…toy” was truly progress!! As startling as it was, we knew that Daniel had begun the process of generating his own unique sentences. We never actually witnessed single words being spoken in Stage 3, however, as Daniel’s language competence led immediately to rudimentary generative grammar. Probably each of us has a list like this…a list of colorful, but puzzling “gestalts,” or whole sentences, repeated verbatim by the ASD children in our lives. We commonly call it “echolalia,” or “delayed echolalia,” meaning that kids “echo” it, not right after they hear it (“immediate echolalia”), but later, or “delayed.” It is the language our ASD kids repeat verbatim from other sources, very often movies. We often call it “video talk,” and, even though we’ve been told otherwise, we sometimes think of it is meaningless.

This is a moving and fascinating account of a bright and ambitious young Jew trying self-consciously to break out of small-town New England to achieve greatness. The story is heroic, but it is not without pathos. This is really a book about books—how beautiful they are, and how the examined life cannot be lived without them, since they have been the mirror in which Freedman learned to see himself."—Stanley N. Katz, Princeton University Each slide presents a grid with 16 letters, and children are asked to find as many words as they can. The longer the word, the more points are awarded. The points system is as follows: 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: letter combinations after each of these letters. This is basically an advanced exercise in word building,

Curriculum

We will return to Will’s story, I promise you. But before we do, let’s continue to construct the conceptual bridge from typical kids to ADD kids, and next, to those ASD children who are younger and solidly within the prime language learning years…those who are 3 – 8 years old. Their story will help us better understand older kids, like Will, whose language appears more rigid and intractable. 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.

There are, in fact, 107 possible words in the "OSPD6" that experts say you absolutely must memorize if you’re 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. A few months later, Dylan still had a few Stage 3 constructions, but was more solidly at Stages 4 and 5. Typical utterances included:After this phone call, I couldn’t wait to meet Will! And I couldn’t wait to begin to listen to his language more closely. If my experience with kids on the spectrum over the last 10 years had taught me anything, it was that this gestalt language was prevalent among children with ASD diagnoses…and was part of the predictable pattern of our kids’ language development! (See Sidebar: The Stages of Gestalt Language Acquisition). We have come a long way from the days when early ABA researchers admonished kids, “Don’t echo,” before the functional value of language gestalts was understood. The efforts of numerous researchers, including Prizant, Wetherby, and others, established the functions of echoed utterances, analyzing over a thousand of them spoken by children with ASD dignoses, and realizing that they serve all the same communicative functions of more typical language. Prizant, Wetherby, Rydell, and others determined that “echoing” is used by 85% of ASD kids, and, in many of them, is the first step in a language acquisition process that leads to flexible, generative language development, like “typically-developing” children. I’d had a really tough year, having recently broken up with my long term boyfriend and moved from our lovely flat to lodging with a family. He asked me whether I’d ever felt this way before and whether I’d ever taken any medication before. He signed me off work for a timescale that we agreed together, discussed medication options and printed off some information about antidepressants should I wish to take them. He also referred me for an assessment for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and suggested I stay with a friend or family member and return at the end of my sign-off period to discuss the future."

This PowerPoint has everything you'll need to provide your class or children with some fun word games for kids. An impressive story, yes…but unusual only in the speed with which Bevin successfully mitigated from his gestalts, and generated his own, original sentences. His process is the same one we see with every child we have worked with in Natural Language Acquisition! The Scrabble board game was invented during the Great Depression in 1933 by Alfred Butts, an out-of-work New York architect.like "Q" and "X"). As a defensive player, it’s your job to try to prevent your opponent from being able to tools, and articles, so you have all the resources you need to crush friends and family in Scrabble (with love). 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. Finding the Words is a masterclass not only on grief, but on survival. The tragic deaths of Colin Campbell’s teenage children, Ruby and Hart, created a sinkhole of sorrow so deep it felt as though it might consume the world. Though this book emerged from that terrible loss, it never feels despairing. Instead, with profound vulnerability, unflinching honesty, and startling humor, Campbell offers a rare glimpse at the depths of unimaginable loss and a pathway forward toward renewed life. This book’s timeless wisdom is a gift to anyone with a broken heart, and to all who care for the broken-hearted with love.”