Speech and language therapy interventions for children with primary speech and/or language disorders Background Description of the condition Speech and/or language disorders are amongst the most common developmental difficulties in childhood. Such difficulties are termed 'primary' if they have no known aetiology, and 'secondary' if they are caused by another condition such as autism, [...]
Picture Exchange Communication (PECS) I had the opportunity to speak with another wonderful mom recently from Sidney about her 7 year old son Matt. Matt's primary communication system is PECS, or picture exchange communication. Receptively Matt was able to hear and understand single concept sentences, like bed time or jump on the trampoline. Sentences [...]
Autism and selecting a school for your child One of the most important decisions we make as parents is selecting a school for our children. For most of us, this is a fairly straightforward affair frequently following a time honoured tradition of attending your local community school. But if your child has diagnosis be [...]
Speech, Language and Sensory Issues What Treatments are Available for Speech, Language and Sensory Issues? The following therapies—also called “allied health services”—address symptoms commonly associated with autism, but not specific to the disorder. Speech Language Therapy Most autism behavioral intensive therapy programs include speech-language therapy. With a variety of [...]
Learning Disabilities What are learning disabilities (LD)? If your child is not doing as well in school as they have the potential to, they may have a learning disability. Having a learning disability means having a normal intelligence but a problem in one or more areas of learning. A learning [...]
Autism, communication and parenting: our journey to learning readiness. One of the most frequent questions I get asked by parents is 'how do I get my son to co-operate with me?'. If I were to translate this question into a term more familiar to teachers, it would be how to get 'instructional control' [...]
Online autism speech and language programs How we achieved the level of speech and language our boys now have is of interest to many parents. Val and I receive hundreds of messages everyday seeking information and advice based on our experiences with Conor and Eoin. Many of these e-mails relate to online speech and [...]
Autism and getting the best out of school I can’t believe the summer is all but gone and the children are returning to school. Even here at the national university of Ireland in Galway, the campus is coming alive with no less than 20,000 students. Having spent more than 20 years in industry surrounded [...]
Special needs parenting, you can't do it on your own. There are times that I feel a little confused by advocacy and the debate surrounding the needs of our autistic children. In all the advocacy within society about parenting special-needs children, I believe the fundamentals can get forgotten. By this I mean that [...]
Autism Communication and instructional strategies We often get questions from families about how to manage their child's Autistic behavior, in particular the use of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). While Val and I researched an attempted to use ABA with our boys, it was not a success. We had to find another answer. We are [...]
