I mainly love going and seeing what they have to say about Dylan and the changes they are seeing. But most importantly, I love seeing the love and care they show for him! He has definitely been in a place for these past 2 years where he has been well taken care of and that is sad to take him away from, but I think they will love him just as much at Utah Autism Academy.
My take aways from this meeting is that they know Dylan and he loves his treats, therefore, he works to get those treats! They said he often tries to skip past some work to get to the treat, such as, when looking through a book of things he should do(each page has an assignment type thing) he often does the first page and then looks for the page with the snack on it, so that he can get his snack.
The speech therapist had so much excitement for his progress and wants us to make sure they know what they have been doing this year because she feels it is working out so well. Instead of having her come once a week for a longer amount of time, she has been coming 3-4 times a week for 5-10 minutes at a time. She wonders if he has Apraxia. The way she described it is say you want to go to a store but you walk out your door and there is a field with very tall grass blocking your way. You trudge through until you get to your destination. The next time you go to the store, same problem, however, you have created an idea of where to go from walking on the grass previously so you know where you are going and that continues until the grass has been pushed down and you have your path made. Dylan has the same problem, but instead of the trail being made more visible, his grass grows quickly and covers his previous trail. It may take him a lot more "trips" and more frequently for his "grass" to stay down. She used an example of one day he kept referring to Bubbles as "buh" all session long, she was amazed. The next day, nothing!
She wants us to make sure we have an actual Speech Therapist working with him to continue working on motor development so that he can make connections on how to move his mouth to get the correct sound out. She talked about how he has been babbling so much more and that he can produce sounds she asks for, but it is usually with another sound attached. For example, she asks him to say "ee" He will start babbling(but she can see he is working and really trying to get to the right sound) so it sounds something like, "mmmemegubmee"so they want him to really work on the motor part of it and be able to produce only the sound asked for on command. Sherry had showed her our video of Dylan saying,"I love you" and that made her ecstatic! I could see she loves Dylan just like the teachers do. She laughed about the treats and said she had quit telling Dylan "No" when he came to her. She would take him into the kitchen area of the class to work with him. Dylan knows that was where the good stuff was kept, so he would search the cupboards and find his treat. She would place it on the table and when they were done that was what he earned!
The Occupational Therapist started off by saying he must not have got the memo of Dylan's love for treats, because he didn't always work as good with him, ha ha. He is able to unbutton things, take lids off, stack 9(on this attempt) blocks and a few other things. He wasn't able to button back up, put lids on, build things out of blocks or copy what he did in drawing(like OT draws straight line and Dylan then does the same). He did say, he felt like Dylan was just "Done" and didn't want to put forth the effort so he probably could do some of this stuff but didn't. He said maybe if he had the treats, he would have been willing to do more ha ha! In this area we need to work on the writing because he just doesn't care for that too much. They want him to be doing as they do and follow their lead. I learned something here as well, and this just shows I haven't really worked with him in this area(oops) but when the OT was talking about scissors, it requires him using both hands but he knows what needs to be done, but when forced to use one hand he would use the right hand. Sherry spoke up and said they had decided a while ago that they thought he was left handed and asked my opinion. I really didn't know what to say, because I have seen him use both hands but I just assumed right handed, but there is a lot of left handed on both sides of the family. It will be interesting to see what he ends up being and I will try to work with him a little bit!
In a classroom setting they are continuing on matching, following directions, sitting in group settings for longer amounts of time, and his social skills. They said he has come a long way in this and when completing tasks he often looks up to them for approval. Before he would just continue on and not pay attention to there being someone there.
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