My Green Family. ramblings of one family's journey to green living

Today was Tristan’s day of speech therapy and he did great! Our speech language pathologist (SLP) is starting him on the picture exchange communication system (PECS). Basically Tristan has to give her a picture of an item in order to play with it. For example, she had bubbles and Tristan had to give her the little card with bubbles on it before she would blow the bubbles. She would also hold up two cards with different items on them and he would choose what he wanted, like bubbles or the shape sorter. Let me tell you this kid loves bubbles!

So this system is supposed to help kids that are nonverbal to communicate and eventually lead to verbal communication. The theory behind this system is that the child is getting an immediate and tangible reward for communicating. Eventually the child will get how two way communication should work and the benefits of two way communication. One study of 18 preschool children with language delays showed that these children used PECS to communicate outside of therapy sessions and half of these children stopped using PECS and started using speech within a year.

Tristan’s therapy sessions are just half an hour once a week so we really have to do a lot of work at home. We’re going to start doing some picture exchange for simple stuff to start with for stuff that Tristan loves, like bubbles and bananas. And then we’ll eventually move to more and more pictures and then a picture schedule. A picture schedule is just a pictoral schedule of his day, and is really supposed to help with transitions from one activity to another. Speaking of transitions, normally Tristan does have a really hard time leaving one place and going to another. This kid rocked the transitions today. He went from playing in the lobby at Kidsabililty to the SLPs office without a sound even though he was in the middle of playing with puzzles. Believe me this is normally meltdown worthy. And then he went from playing in the office to outside to go home very quietly too, although I made sure to bring my secret weapon, a fruit to go snack.

And just as an aside as I’m telling Odum about the whole bubble thing miss Maya decides to say bubbles numerous times with that big beautiful smile on her face, what a character!