I finally managed to resume my lesson/therapy sessions with Rayyan yesterday. Work is still piling up and my house is in a total mess (I have been 'maidless' for weeks). But I told myself yesterday that no matter how busy I am, I must put aside time to conduct my sessions with him. This is totally crucial. I don't want him to regress and lose all the skills that he has acquired.
Anyway, he had his 'off' moments as usual during the session but managed to follow through most of the tasks. And as usual, he loves to do counting and matching. He is really good at that. Even his therapist said that when it comes to learning, he has no problems at all. But he needs lots of coaching and encouragement when it comes to play skills and self-help skills.
We also need to work on his 'joint attention'. Through his therapist and the course that I attended at Pathlight School, I learnt that 'joint attention' refers to him being connected to the people around him. That means he pays attention to what others are saying, he looks at others to check on how to react to certain things and learn how to behave by copying others. In other words, it will be a collective experience between him and the people around him, where everybody enjoys the same thing. If he doesn't have 'joint attention', he doesn't know what is going on around him, he is disconnected with his surroundings, he doesn't pay attention to what's important and this will affect his learning and relationship with others. People with autism usually lack this skill and Rayyan is not excluded. We really have to work on this by getting him engaged as much as we can.
Anyway, here is a video of him doing counting. Actually, I only had to teach him once and he got the idea on how to go about doing this counting game. This was taken about two weeks ago. My sessions are usually an infusion of ABA and FUN! I am still learning on how to make my sessions more effective by studying and applying various techniques but I will usually sing and do different actions because Rayyan likes that. I don't want my sessions to be too rigid and put him off! I want to encourage him to love learning.
