Jamie

Like many parents, the summer holidays posed us a challenge: how would we keep Jamie occupied? Without the support of school there was a danger that he would regress. He did ABA every day, concentrating on simple sentences and writing skills. When we began the drawing programme he could not make a circle. This required some perseverance, and it took around three months for him to master letters and simple pictures. Now he can write his name and draw things like basic faces and animals.

School

In September Jamie started school full time. After just two sesssions it became clear that the previous arrangement of some mainstream and some special school would not work out. The mainstream class had doubled in size, and he could not deal with the noise and confusion, and had outbursts of violence. It was quickly decided to move him to the special school full-time.

Whilst this breakdown of the mainstream school placement was disheartening, we were assured that he would learn more in a smaller group. Violence continued to be a problem in the special school, although to a lesser extent. The school monitored it on video to find out what the causes were, and it was found that he would sometimes hit out when people encroached on his personal space. At home it was much less of an issue, although it occasionally presented problems.

One negative result of school was that Jamie would arrive home tired, and sometimes fall asleep as soon as he got home. This meant that he spent less time doing discrete trials and he would do them when his concentration was waning. As a result he made less progress on specific language tasks. His schoolwork was broader in scope and did not focus on this area, but at least he was learning new things.

The question of what to teach next is one that has to be asked constantly during an ABA programme. This is increasingly true once the most obvious problems are dealt with. What works and what doesn't has to be kept under review, and not all children learn things in the same order. It was important to stop teaching something that Jamie was making no progress on, and break it up into smaller blocks, as well as teaching what he was ready to learn. There was some trial and error going on here.

The Future

After Jamie had done ABA for one year, it was clear he had made some progress. In December the short sentences he had learnt were being built on with phrases such as "What's that?" and "I don't know". He was beginning to reciprocate information. Work on "When?" questions and the concept of time was ongoing. He was fully toilet trained and had been for several months, and able (albeit reluctant sometimes) to dress himself, although he was still having trouble with fastenings.

Towards the end of the autumn term hitting and pinching was reported far less frequently by school. Repetitive routines had become less of a feature of daily life, to be replaced by more typical play activities such as pretend play with dolls, watching TV, and looking through picture books. Jamie's speech still needed a considerable amount of refinement, particularly with pronouns, adverbs and the past tense, but conversations were increasingly possible, and much more communication was going on. Finding out from him what he had for lunch that day may seem trivial, but it wasn't to us.