In the deep end

I found out today that Nina will not be supervising one of my programs. C has been launched, ready or not. I am sort of excited about being able to make a greater contribution to moulding the program. A lot of my unease with his program, was in feeling like we had skipped too quickly through a few steps. C is echolalic. Which essentially means he echoes. "Do you want red or green?" "Red or green." says C. The words can be clear, but to C they have no functionality. I could be asking him to sit in an ice bath. So with the language component of the program, if I gave the cue, he could finish the sentence from his selection of automatic phrases. e.g. Table and....... chair. Without the prompt there is nothing. In some cases he has learned which words get him something. Rice, said at the table gets food, but if I switch to a different food he still says rice because that worked before. Usually you need 50 functional words, mostly nouns. Then you can start pairing them together, like "Mummy up".and then you can start forming small sentences. His program is working on sentences, but unless prompted he doesn't spontaneously use 50 words yet.
I am looking into an online course of Floortime, Stanley Greenspan's program of facilitating meaningful interactions through play. I know Nina likes us to make the learning fun, and that even collecting sets of data, should feel like play to the child. So I will try to mix more of that. I think that extending the hours of therapy, and spending more time on each set, to hide the learning in the game, and reinforcement, will make it more fun for both me and the child. That's where I have been creating my own anxiety to an extent. Rush, rushing to get all the data, and then watching his attention fade, as I hope the session is nearly over. With this new program we get to colour in, and do some counting. I make a cd of some familiar classic songs to play between each transition. I also re-borrowed Lynn Koegel's book explaining PRT(Pivotal Response Training) techniques to refresh my memory. It should keep me focused on getting joint attention, and helping him attend to multiple cues(visual as well as auditory). While the play techniques will hopefully help with the motivation. Back to study then. In my element really, my favourite thing is processing new information and theorising.