Skills and Schedules

This post is dedicated to Tyler's therapist. She has worked so hard over the last two years with him. Tyler has fought us tooth and nail with some of his skill sets for the plain reason of him not being interested in it.



Let's take stacking blocks for example. For the last year and a half we have been trying to get Tyler to stack more than 3 blocks up before he knocks them down. Yes, his eye hand coordination does make this difficult for him. And the boy urge to knock things down is incredibly strong here. But we know he can do it because we have caught him alone in the playroom with a built tower before. Well today, I got rare video of the stacking. He can stack what 8-10 blocks!!! Better watch out Tyler, we are on to you now.


Puzzles have been another point of contention. I've told the therapist for weeks that Tyler can manipulate a puzzle piece from a puzzle we just picked up on loan from the library and get it in the correct slot with minimal physical help from me. These are new to Tyler puzzles. The one yesterday was taken out of the bag 5 mins before this video was taken for the first time. See how he can turn the fire coats around and get the piece in all by himself. Also another skill that we can see him exercising here is scan and seek. We have been working hard to get him to find a specific object within a batch of objects (usually we only have four images to find one image in). Again we utilize the puzzle here. Ask were the fire dog is and he looks at the board and points with accuracy to the dog. There are 10 images on this board.

So I guess our lesson here is to capitalize on practicing skills on Tyler's schedule. Long story short, nothing really new here.