Parents w/ low functioning kids - what skills to focus on ?

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I just wanted to chime in to say that I agree with the other posters that I believe communication - in any form - is more important than talking. With ASL, he can communicate what he wants/needs. When children see the value of communication, this encourages more communication. I taught my son to sign first. When he learned to speak, the signs just faded away - it did not interfere with his desire to speak. Also, you mentioned that you were worried about how many signs he could make given his fine-motor issues. My sons signs were not perfect (some were even made up), but we and his teachers could understand him and that was what was important. I know you are worried he will not learn to talk, but I have heard stories of children who are 8 or 9 speaking their first word. If you try to teach too many things at once, you might achieve nothing. Focusing on one of 2 critical skills, at least with my son, we made much better progress than working on 10 things at once.

Since your son likes playground equipment, does he like other active play? We had great luck moving my son forward while focusing on his love of rough housing. We would put him in a blanket and I would hold one end and the therapist would hold the other. We would swing him back and forth and then stop. He would then need to communicate so we would swing him again. At first, eye contact, then we would hand-over-hand sign, then sign, then he had to make the first sound of the word - then eventually say the word. We also sang songs, and then stopped suddenly and he would do the next word to get us to swing him again. Some of the first things he said that were recognizable were him "singing" songs even though the words were jibberish, we recognized the tune. Your therapists may already do something like this, but we liked it because it worked on communication and engaged play at the same time.

No form of communication seems to work with my son. He can say words, he can make signs, but he just won't use any of it to communicate. Lately he just screams or cries to get someone's attention (aside from the usual hand/finger pulling.)

Hi DnRn,

Your approach to teaching him to communication sounds like mine, especially about his using modified ASL signs during play time. In fact, he has so few reinforcers that we usually end up getting his signs out of him during active play - either "rough-housing" or at the playground. His few signs are of his reinforcers, and it has been difficult to teach him anything else, mainly because he has no use for it.

I am actually really worried because he is completely indifferent to toy play. Like I said, he enjoys playing on the playground and with materials such as sand, whipping cream (sensory stuff) etc, but toys like drums, rattles, cars, etc are completely ignored, unless he can use them to stim on visually. Did your son play with toys at all, at that age ? If not, did you work on it ? And how did you go about toy play ?

I know I should not be comparing kids, even if they both happen to be mine, but I remember my daughter also not being into toys. However, while she, too, studiously ignored toys, she did a lot of pretend play & dress up with real life objects, including my clothes, make up etc !

We are currently focussing on language development, but I am thinking that we should also focus on toy playing. I am worried about his cognitive development more than about anything else, right now, and it appears that toy / active play is the way to go about facilitating it.

Wreck-Gear,

Does your son have no play at all ? What about sensory play or playground playing ?

Another question - Is imitation (gross motor, object etc) a sign of cognition ?

Okay, just a few ideas that came into my mind when reading this thread. My daughter 6 does have sever language and a cognitive delay.

Speech and AAC
- My daughter didn't take well to PECS but responded quite well to the IPAD. But I didn't start off using the IPAD for communication, I started with some Apps that were more visually stimulating to teach the basic stills of 'touch' and 'drag' with the fingers. My daughter really liked an App called "Art of Glow", also "Fireworks" and "Fluidity". From there we moved on to more game types of apps, like Monkey's preschool lunchbox, Bugs and Buttons, stuff like that. After about 6 months she was much more engage with the IPAD and we were able to move into more traditional AAC type apps like Prolo2go etc.

- My daughter also uses some basic signs. Our experiance was that any form of communication we could get her to use, PECS, IPAD, ASL etc reinforced her language skills, not suppress them.

- Other people have mentioned it, she also responded well to ESL videos

- Although I hate PECS with a passion and my daughter didn't catch on, I'd be really concerned if my service provider either didn't know how or refused to teach it. There are 6 stages to the PECS protical which we have adapted and used to teach AAC on the IPAD. I'd really question your service provider on this and if they don't understand or 'believe' in the basic teaching structure of PECS then I'd find a new service provider

Pretend play - My daughter is 6 and is just starting to develop some pretend play skills over the last year. She responds to a technique called video modelling. We make short clips 30 sec to a minute showing appropriate toy play with a corresponding short phrase. Show her the video 2 or 3 times, then bring to toy out to play with, over time shes began to imitate the play even without the video before hand. She will now briefly play teaparty, doll house and with her litttle pet shop playground set

Without reading everyone's replies, I think that it is very important to focus on speech because it is generally considered more difficult to make progress once the child is past the age of 4 if the child is completely nonverbal at that age.

That being said, there is a large, recent, longitudinal study in the journal Pediatrics which found that almost 50% of children who were autistic and speech delayed at 4 (this included kids that knew some words but didn't speak in phrases) became fluent speakers between the ages of 8 and 17. A large group of the children studies learned to speak phrases but didn't become fluent speakers.

I taught my older son with high functioning classic autism, age 8, to speak, by the way. It was a long and tedious process, and he continued to make improvement long after the age of 4 as long as I worked with him. He also learned to read at the same time, which helped a lot.

My younger son, now aged 5, also has speech issues, but he doesn't have a speech delay.

Both kids are still capable of improving their speech as long as I work with them. I used to make my own materials, but I mainly use ready-made materials purchased off the Internet from specialty catalogs to save time. For younger, less verbal kids, you might find many cheap speech options (videos, picture books, picture dictionaries, flash cards, etc.) on amazon.com or in the ESL, grammar, or baby sections of your local teacher supply store or used book store.

I have a bunch of free YouTube videos that you can link to by going to my free website. There are also a bunch of links to other websites that might help, as well as catalogs where you can buy speech materials.

I wish you the best of luck.