Techniques and Approaches
Your child will have holistic, developmentally appropriate care that focuses on building underlying capacities so that the skills they learn can be internalized. The following approaches are areas that I have had extensive training and mentorship.
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DIRFloortime
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Attended ICDL DIR 201, Promoting Basic Functional Emotional Development
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PROMPT (PROMPTS for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets)
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Bridging Level Trained
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Orton-Gillingham Approach for reading and spelling instruction
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60 hour course completion
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Social Thinking
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3 Day conference including training in use of Social Thinking Dynamic Assessment
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DIRFloortime:
DIRFloortime is a developmental social pragmatic intervention introduced and studied by Stanley Greenspan, M.D. and Serena Wieder, Ph.D. The DIR model itself is the most important component, as it informs decisions made by clinicians in building a child's ability to engage and relate to others. The 'D' is for Developmental Stages, or proposed benchmarks, that all humans go through as they develop and grow socially. The "I" is for Individual Differences, such as physical, cognitive, linguistic, sensory, or emotional strengths and challenges that each person is born with and presents with biologically. These differences make each person unique. The 'R' is for Relationships and represents two concepts. First, how the environment and/or caregivers relate and adapt to the child's individual differences. Secondly, the 'R' represents the concept that each person learns best within the security of strong relationships.
The play/activity sessions (often thought of when this approach is mentioned) are known as Floortime sessions and the direction of play is guided by the D, the I, and the R in any given situation. Floortime is not necessarily only done on the floor. Shared imagination in young children evolves into shared conversation in older kids and adults, which often requires symbolic and reflective thinking. The DIR model that informs Floortime play is still used to inform 'Floortime' conversation, particularly when independent problem solving and self-reflection on one's own decision making is a goal (i.e., to have one be less 'prompt dependent'). The beautiful thing about the DIR model is that labels are not a focus; each child's individual strengths and challenges are identified regardless, with the strengths utilized as starting points to then expand and challenge the weaknesses in a meaningful, secure, and respectful way that promotes inherent motivation and skill acquisition. For further information regarding DIRFloortime, please refer to the Interdisciplinary Council on Development and Learning (ICDL) which was initially founded by Dr. Greenspan. Their website is at https://www.ICDL.com
PROMPT (Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets)
PROMPT is a holistic approach for the treatment of articulation and motor-speech disorders that integrates with language learning and social skills. It enables multi-sensory feedback that helps with sequencing movements from one sound to the next and across longer utterances, challenges often associated with apraxia of speech. While most well known for it's use of tactile-kinesthetic cues to teach vowel and consonant placement within the physical sensory domain, PROMPT's theoretical framework also embraces the cognitive-linguistic and social-emotional domains of human development. With an understanding that deficits in one domain impact other domains, treatment targets maximize functional gains because they are the sounds, words, and phrases that are most useful within each child's environment but still within their current motor-speech capacity. This in turn allows more opportunities for communication success from which to build upon. A comprehensive assessment will guide us in finding an appropriate starting point for target words and phrases. You can read more about PROMPT therapy at https://promptinstitute.com.
Orton-Gillingham approach to reading and spelling
Orton-Gillingham is an approach that embraces systematic and multi-sensory teaching of decoding skills at the phonemic level. Sound-symbol connection is taught systematically as well, to enable encoding while spelling. Complexity is increased only as one progresses through each prior level of understanding. Lively Letters is an Orton-Gillingham based program that is available now as well. You can read more about Orton-Gillingham at https://www.ortonacademy.org.