some updates from school

I received a great "daily sheet" home yesterday. It simply said "Holden did very well working at the table today and he was perfect on his manding."

That may not *sound* like much to most people, but it's a lot for us. Manding is asking for the things that you want, making requests. Basically, it's teaching him that by talking or signing for things he wants ... he can get them.

So, I emailed to ask for a little more explanation and here's her response:
---Manding is requesting items and when Holden works, he gets to request some of his items that he likes. He didn’t need prompting on any of them today. We still pair sign/vocal although his approximations are getting better. The items he is manding for unprompted are cereal (dry cereal and his cereal bar), cookie, cake (muffin), pretzel (struggles both with sign and vocal), juice, light, candy, chip, chicken and bubbles. He mands for other items intermittently and needs some prompting to ask for them. They are fish (fish toy), circle (poker chips to put in a container), face (happy face toy), boat (wooden Noah’s ark), and other toys. I am starting to have him mand for other things in his lunch such as his “meat” (lunch meat) and “sandwich”. Unprompted mands are a good thing and will lead to his manding for things that are not present, but he is motivated for (the “MO”).

I emailed her back and asked how many words or approximations she thinks he has at this point. This is her response to me:
---I would have to look at his book, but unprompted items is around 10, prompted adds at least 10 more and echoic (repeating spoken words) too many to say , but his Kaufman objectives is around 8 and they are getting better too. He does interrupt during speech and we have a procedure for it, but he loves saying his words and gets in a hurry. For example, we will present the word "eat" and as were saying it, he interrupts and starts to say it too. We have to say "wait", put up a clipboard, count
to 5 and re-present the word. It works very well. He is noticing things more (pictures on the wall, people talking to him) and the stimmy walk has vanished.

Let me just pull out the high points of that email conversation, as far as I'm concerned.

1. Manding is requesting items and when Holden works, he gets to request some of his items that he likes. He didn’t need prompting on any of them today.

2. Unprompted mands are a good thing and will lead to his manding for things that are not present, but he is motivated for (the “MO”).

3. unprompted items is around 10, prompted adds at least 10 more and echoic (repeating spoken words) too many to say. (I think his unprompted is higher, so I'm going to create a notebook to keep track of everything he says that's unprompted).

4. he loves saying his words

5. He is noticing things more (pictures on the wall, people talking to him) and the stimmy walk has vanished.

The update couldn't get much better in my eyes.