are very excited to have a listen and jamie hear from advanced learning center to get their right advanced learning center and they're going to be doing a presentation tonight on teaching social skills across the day before we hand everything over to these lovely ladies we want to let you know a little bit about the belmont special education advisory council couple things that are coming up so that you are aware of the things that we're doing the next presentation and the last presentation parent information session for this year after today will be on may the seventh and that is presentation called basic rights so if you want to know know what your rights are as parents we have a speaker coming from the federation for children and they will be happy to answer any of your questions and if you have questions about that after have there are happy to  tell you all about it heather and i both have a lot here mary j peterman we are the co chairs for the belmont special education advisory council we are a volunteer run organization and we are the town mandated pac so if you want to work from a show about that serious afterwards one very very important thing we must tell you about right now the very last thing that we do every year is a lovely awards ceremony it is a we are our it will be our tenth annual appreciation award ceremony so if you have somebody out there special who has done some outstanding services for your child and you would like to nominate them for an award everybody who gets nominated gets an award and we invite them to the may twenty first very lovely ceremony where we invite the school committee we invite the  principals usually everybody comes and we invite the nominee and the person being nominated and it's just a nice way give them a little light dinner for the evening and recognise them it's a lovely event and what's really cool is that whatever you or your child sometimes the children give the awards which is lovely but if you or your child whatever you write down on your form gets read to the participants so it's really really lovely so we want to encourage you to do a nomination and the nomination forms are on the table as you go out and i forget and yes so also on the table is a little bit about us our organization and at the bottom there's contact info for both myself and mary jo and there's also very importantly a link where you can go and sign up for our our lists or where you can find all this information you know that way and also if you're interested for the rest of this year or for playing purposes and next year to volunteer with us we've been very much appreciated we're looking for help with a lot of different areas please see us afterwards or if you just want to e mail us later he's just taking one  and i am going to mention one more thing about the yahoo group that she mentioned in addition to getting all of our information we also send out other packs information and so the because there are presentations happening all over the state of massachusetts and some of them quite local that are good presentations we can't have have had them all and so if you are interested in having more it's a really good listserv to get on we do not bombard you re send you the basics and then the additional stuff that that that's local so i hope that helps you guys in the know and i think so too so let's get on with this really close presentation i'm very excited that they're here i i personally have utilized the services from the advance warning center so if you want to talk to me personally afterward you can do that so let's hand it over to alyssa and jamie i think all right thank you so much all right so we're going to start off by telling you just a little bit about our company  first off is anyone heard of us before always like to know right great so a little bit about us our office is located in watertown just about two miles around the corner from here we've been around for twelve years we provide home based services doing one on one you know we've been doing one on one services in the home we also do consultations with schools so making sure that what we're doing in the home is what your child's classroom teacher is doing to us that way if we're all on the same page we all sort of see the same results which is the end goal here we do generalization assessments so we might go into your child's school and watch and see how we are here she is interacting when they're not around us or not around their teacher or whoever's working with them in the home and sort of see are the skills that we're teaching them or the skills that we're seeing in our offices or in the home are they expanding to the classroom and then if they are if they're not we sort of make recommendations based on what can we do to make these skills start happening more or is what we're doing working and are we on the right track so really making sure that we're using an effective intervention that's sort of giving them the tools they need to you know i heard a lot of people talking about needing you know help making friends or initiating conversations so we sort of provide the assessment to see if we're teaching them you know in home are they taking that to the classroom we also run social skills groups throughout the week basically the way that works in a nutshell is we will pair your child with anywhere you know sometimes three to four students who we think would be a compatible match kids who might need to work on the same skills and we would meet once a week we do in the summer we have a summer program where we run for seven weeks we do services in the fall and then we also have a spring semester during weeks when school isn't in session we do run gap program so that's again social skills groups but we're it's only going to be during the week when school isn't in sessions and most of our services can be covered through your insurance so if that's something you'd be more interested to hear about  we have all of our information and feel free to reach out to us we were happy to talk to you more about that so that's a little bit about what we do about what i do so i'm jamie and i am a staff trainer in the senior social skills group leader with us so what i do basically is training new hires and the bigger part of my job is running social skills groups that basically takes up most of my day and this is alyssa introduce yourself and i am the placement in private sc designing center so i am the one that is assessing all the students that come in and then deciding which groups will fit best together and what goals everyone needs to work on and then also assessing progress on going and supervising other players and a little bit about the students we do service some of our students are on the autism spectrum some are not basically any sort of disability or no disability we sort of service the entire range there what we are going to specifically focus on tonight's really honing in on social skills first let me give you a disclaimer we've never seen your children so what we're presenting tonight we hope to just give you the tools to be able to walk out of here and be like ok i think i have a better idea of what i could do obviously we haven't seen a child so we don't know exactly what it looks like so we might not have the you know the exact right treatment for you but hopefully you'll leave here with some good ideas of what you can start practicing so two questions that will focus on so what social skills should i focus on teaching and we'll talk a little bit more about specifically what those look like and then how should we teach those skills and that's what alyssa is going to give you some ideas on how to do  right so there are three categories we're sort of going to look at all of the skills we talk about you know the spectrum of social skills goes on and on forever so this is just a brief introduction  we'll talk about friendship skills plain cooperation skills and then body language nothing that we talk about is going to be exhaustive obviously the list could go on and on right so playing cooperation w our first category so we're going to define playing cooperation skills as the skills that allow children to essentially just play and interact with other children i know i heard some people talking on their way in about you know there's a child just not holding conversations so this might fall into that category so here are some examples i'll give you about a minute or so to look over these you might notice as we're going through these all of the skills that we're defining we want to be really observable skills so if it's something like sharing toys or sharing an item spontaneously you know if a sibling for instance asks the child can i have a turn does your child share those asking if you can share does that make some sort of behavior happen that we would want to work on it's just something that we can actually see another playing cooperations here we might look at is of accepting play so if a peer if your son or daughter's on a play day and appear says like oh let's make our race cars go down the track as fast as they can does your son or daughter except that play bit will they follow through with what appears suggested on the other hand do they give their friends ideas of like hey let's go play django or let's go swing outside you know giving a friend an idea of what they can do you talk to my singing is a really big one and i think some of us might see a lot of maybe maybe not  so you know are they able to negotiate in a way that you know they get what they want but also their friend is you know still having fun playing with them and getting what he or she wants as well and then also in this category would be initiat initiating and maintaining conversations this could be you know walking up to a friend and asking any sort of starter question like hey what are you doing this weekend and then continuing to follow through with whatever their peer answers with what they're doing that we this is a skill we work on a lot specifically in social groups i think the next category is body language for me to start with a little comic so despite his perfect poker face the others always seem to know when toby had a good hand so toby's faces pretty solid but is bored little tail is just wagging so body language a lot of kids you know don't pick up on it what might be obvious to me i might be able to look at your face and tell that you're angry some kids don't pick up on those cues and so body language is just using body language to communicate with others using non verbal communication is essential to building relationships with peers adults and families  i think i've read around eighty percent of how we communicate is nonverbal so that's a pretty big deal if your child doesn't you know pick up on all of these nonverbal cues you know eighty percent of communication could be lost and that's obviously a lot so there are ways to teach these skills willis is going to talk about that some examples of body language anything like following a nonverbal directions so if i you know just to like this most of you would recognize i would like you to you know be quiet or talk a little bit softer that might not be obvious to everyone another fun one to teach is sarcastic versus serious so was your friend joking or was your friend being serious sort of being able to discriminate when our friend is joking or being serious i think another big one here is identifying accidental versus intentional actions so if your son is like playing with a tower  the tower gets knocked over being able to recognize that his sister knock it over on purpose or was it an accident you know so sort of just being able to recognize and then respond appropriately to those situations and friendship skills is our third category friendship skills include social rules and conventions that most children will learn just by observation again that doesn't happen for all kids which is why we like to teach them so some examples of friendship skills can be anything just like cheering for a peer so if your friend is you know racing their car down and your son is like cheering cheering for the car to go fast  keeping secrets can be another tough one just giving compliments you know if your child doesn't initiate conversations probably giving a compliment spontaneously to someone might be something we could work on to but i like to think about my own life as an adult the way i make new friends it might start with like oh those are cool sunglasses i have a pair like that and that might not be you know it's not a for me that seems easy but for you know someone smaller than me that might be a little more difficult  asking getting to know you questions is another big one you know again think of it as an adult when you need a new person it might be easy to just ask what do you do for a living what's your favorite restaurant in town etc so this is a lot of what we can focus on too is teaching your child giving him the proper tools to be able to you know walk up to a peer and ask him a brand new question and that's a little bit a little bit about friendship skills  how we would teach a particular skill but based on each student we would decide how it is that we teach them a very good question all right so now we're going to talk about how we teach all of these skills because course the important part of the first thing that we're going to do is assess those skills we need to see where your child is at right now otherwise we're not going to able to help them to get where they want to be so you want to make sure that you're observing all of what they're doing see where they're at currently without your help what does a playdate look like when you just step back and watch you can use skill based assessments for this or you can ask others you can ask their teachers their specialists what does it look like when they're in the classroom with their peers are they able to make comments ask their friends questions play near other kids or they just typically playing by themselves so the second step we're going to have is that you need to write a book and this could be something that you  napkin and keep in your kitchen or doesn't need to be something that's so formal but thinking of it more in an observable in measurable way that you can know when you've reached your goal so for instance if the general thought is that he will be more friendly how can we break that down into something you can see so the way you could see something like that is if a peer asked him for a toy will he give it to them and or will he say yes when they ask for it and really share that toy with them so again with writing the goal you just want to make sure that you have your big picture in mind they can keep focusing on that next part that we need to do is break down the scale so a lot of our kids might not be able to start working on just maintaining conversations or making new friends they might need to start with the smaller steps of that so for example with maintaining conversation you might need to start off with asking questions in general or taking turns in the conversation if they can already ask those questions that's why the assessment part of this is really the big part because you need to see where your students a first so there are some more examples in here that will give you some ideas on how you could break down the skills so for asking for items maybe first they need to do it with an adult who can have the patience to wait for them on life their peer might be able to do all and then eventually maybe they'll be able to start doing it with a peer for partner games you might want to start with one partner game versus multiple partner games and make sure that they really have that one game down before you move on to something  different something that can be really helpful is starting out with just identifying accidental actions or intentional actions before going on to how to respond to them so making sure that your stupid your child can really identify what those actions are and whether they're accidental or intentional before asking them to respond to a jury or freeplay situation that you couldn't deal with so far for the accidental versus intentional so like jamie was saying before i'm if someone knocks over your tower that you've been building for quite some time on it do they do it on purpose and should you advocate for yourself or do they do it by accident and you say oh it's ok and just let it go kind of thinking of your problem scale how big of an issue is that should you stand up for yourself or should you just let it go another example would be in the hallways that they can get busy during the changing of classes in middle school if someone bumps into you was it an intentional bump into you should you know seek a teacher's help with something should you advocate for yourself or was it they were in the brush and they weren't looking at you so they bumped into you by accident and and should just let it go so things like along those lines that would you would want to make sure that people are misinterpreting are your students your child isn't misinterpreting them and they respond to them appropriately to that help answer that ok good no problem the next step that you're going to do is you can choose your teaching tactic so once you've figured out where your child child is that written your goal and decide what you want to work on and broken down that goal you can start teaching it to the different types of teaching techniques something we're going to go over in detail and give examples on for each that way you can all have a better understanding of these some of these different types of teaching techniques that you could do them with your child so one of the first props that we tend to use a lot because it's the lead it's one of the least restrictive prompting methods that you can use is priming so some people might call this preaching but what this would be is that you're giving the student or your child the expectation of what they should be doing during a set period of time so if they're going into their play day giving them the reminder you should ask your friend questions about things they like you should you know offer to do something that your friend wants to do you know you should play near your friend or you should tell your friend what you're doing  and really giving them all that information prior to them going into the situation that way you can make it as positive it can experience as possible something that probably isn't helpful is then correcting them throughout the playdate if you haven't prepared them for what they should do during that time another thing you can do with the priming prompt is actually practice it might sound a little bit silly but you could almost put on a play and practice that skill so let's pretend your friend is here and she asks you for a glass of water what's your response going to be or let's pretend your friend is here and she's sitting down and you know just playing with some toys might you ask her if she has these toys for you could see if she wants to play with something different what her favorite toy her questions along those lines and really giving them the opportunity to prepare themselves for what their about to go into homes they listen example here that you're teaching deborah to greet people and walking through the door you're saying remember to say hi to your friend in say their name and smile before we go inside to really make sure that that that signal is there to remind them to do it another example is role playing kind of similar to priming but making everything in the environment as realistic to the natural situation as possible so when you first begin teaching a skill you might start off in a room that's as not distracting it's possible that it doesn't have any kind of distraction in there and but eventually you're going to want to make the environment as similar as possible so using similar toys that you're going to use  sim using similar language when setting all of that up and using many examples of it so that they can make sure that no matter what they come into contact with when they go to a play or when they're out with their friends they will always know how to respond to all those different situations so for example in on here they list that the parent sets up brian's favorite board game and then discusses things to say when he has lost or won the board game and  that that making the environment as similar as possible is that they're using the board game that ryan is going to have with him on his play dates that way he can be as for milieu with that game as possible and can see every possible step when thinking about hey we're going to win we're going to lose this is the game in front of me now i'm prepared for what to do when that happens another thing you can do if if you're able to adapt your model as to having a confederate peer that is able to display the behavior trying to teach so if there's a peer that you notice in your son or daughter's classroom that is already doing the things that you want your son or daughter to do asking them over for a playdate and see if they'll model all those appropriate behaviors for your son or daughter and you can actually you can point them out and say look at what they're doing you should try that in try to engage in those behaviors with really one on one modeling if your kids in a big classroom it might be hard for them to attend to all the different peers in model all those social skills so having that one on one modeling time can be really really helpful example here lists that the parent knows that ben is older that ben's older brother's that is a high status model so meaning that he really likes them and that he will be asked to share the toys  during their playdate so the parent ask them to share with friends and then praises him a lot for doing that so getting the student to play with that really fund peer that they really like another example of something you could do is video modeling so if you have a cousin or a student that's in your child's class that's really that the bigger kid thinks is really cool then you could have you could videotape them doing the action that you want your son or daughter to do and by doing that you would be able to then show your son or daughter that skill and point out all of the appropriate behaviors within that skill and then teach your son or daughter to do those things so for instance here they talk about videotaping charlotte child because in playing polly pocket on and narrating her play so commenting on what everyone's doing and kind of putting on a little pretend  play show and then showing charlotte the video and giving her the same toys and you can even go a step further and identified her you know some of the other teaching methods simultaneously and identify for her what she should be doing during that  time another way that you can teach your child is through video feedback as this would be videotaping your child in the moment and then having them in evaluate their own behavior afterwards and you would want to make sure that your videotaping successive behavior is successful behaviors before moving back to giving them corrective feedbacks to say you're making this as positive as possible and playing with your friends or playing with toys doesn't become a punishing thing so be example that they have here is that parent that he has he him playing with the peer and then they watch the tape together and trials parents point out every time he lets his peer take a turn so something that a lot of people are most probably familiar with are social stories so these are have been used in many different situations there's a lot of research on the fact that reading through something in a story will actually help you engage in that in the appropriate behaviors afterwards so making sure that the child is fraught with stories from the child's perspective so rather than writing it you should do this having it be from at that the student is reading it from their own first person so when i see my friend today i'm going to do these things that way they can practice reading through it all and i can really begin to understand the appropriate level of language and complexity through it  all you want to make sure you're describing of the situation the feeling and then what they should be doing alternatively if there's something different you want them to be doing and then what the consequence of that will be so for example they have here that when kids t is chippy hit them they want hand to read the social story every day before school so that it gets teased in feel that that that he should walk away and they really are outlined not in the story and working on that with him every day another example of a teaching tactic is peer tutoring to having a peer coach the student on a particular scale you can have to find again those confederate peers that are really motivating for your son or daughter and see if they would be able to work on this scale in isolation and really have the patience with your son or daughter prior to them going out with all of their friends in the community  so for example here they have the parent teaching avon's playdate to make leading statements of the having can practice asking questions so on teaching the peer how to do something before you teach your son or daughter how to do something a lot times that the reason playdates can be so difficult is because the other peer isn't responding to your son or daughter if they're if there's no response from them why would they want to talk to them why would they keep asking them questions if they're not going to answer so really making sure to teach both day another helpful teaching packet said sure schedule showing them the sequence of a multi step scale you could show them building a block tower or the pictures of a board game so the first thing you're going to do is roll the dice let's put our picture there we'll take it off when we're done then we're going to take our piece if you're playing sorry take your piece out of start we're going to move across the board game or take that picture off and then you're going to tell your friend it's your turn and then we're going to move on we're going to wait for them to finish their turn and then kind of resetting the picture schedule every time they need to participate in the game and giving them those examples of what they should be doing another example is of flaxseed learning to ask their friends  play at the playground or scheduled houser the things that she needs to do which are think of a game look for a friend say hi and then ask the friend to play additional thing that you could do is silence a no so if your child's able to read non verbal signals or you've taught your child to read those non verbal signals you can prompt it's a prompt that you can use and you and your child only know about it so that it's not stigmatizing when you're out in the community and they can know what he or she is supposed to be doing without being embarrassed about it so that we're not always over correcting or anything like that you're really giving that feedback without a way that anyone else would know about it so this might be helpful with a lot of kids who don't like to be told what to do that you can really practice this in the beginning and say you know i know you don't like me telling you so when when it's time for us to go to your friend's house and you're supposed to say hi when they come to the door i'm going to you know just put my hand up like this and you're going to remember to say hi when we go inside rather than me telling you exactly what to do and i have the example that they have here is that reece is working on cutting down the length of his friend a question and really take into consideration the other person that you're engaging with another helpful teaching tactic is children's literature this is very similar to social stories but of course we can always find every type of book that we want to teach our son or daughter about so social stories you'd be able to make your own children's literature you'd be able to just pull the book out a library so you would want to read the stories with situations in them that you'd like to discuss with your child stop and ask questions about them of course this all depends on comprehension level and ability to understand what's going on in the  story but then relate that book somehow to your child's life of course we want to make sure that these books have meaningful solutions i know that there's a lot of those no david books out there that tell david what he's not supposed to do but looking at the books that really you would make your child want to do what that person in the book is doing so the appropriate behavior so in this example i man has a hard time sharing toys with peers so they read him books about sharing and what you're supposed to do sharing your toys so before starting free play the parents remind him of that story so that he's able to recall what happened in it and then hopefully engage in that behavior during  playdate another really good example of something that we use very often is watching videos of different things and always on the search for videos whether it be looking at different emotions and identifying those with kids or really watching a video and teaching them emotions predicting actions or other types of discriminations so for instance if you want to do your child to learn about what a person looks like when they're sad finding a video that leads up to a sad moment pause it on the person's face and say you know how do you think that person feels this is the facial expression that you see when someone is sad can you identify that for me and then thinking about some ways of what you might do if that person is sad them if they're ok if they say they are ok just say oh you know let me know i'm here if you need anything maybe giving them some space or asking some more probing questions but you can really pause the video and take that teaching opportunity rather than hoping that your child gets the outcome of the movie or the moral of the story and you can ask questions and relate it to your child's life so if there was a hard time in a playdate really speaking to  so the next thing that we want to do is set up the environment all right so before you begin any kind of a teaching situation you want to make sure that you ask yourself the following questions is it best that i teach my as my child this by ourselves in the beginning should i only be working on it with my child and without a peer or can i have a peer present or should i have multiple peers present where is my child ready to begin because there's really only one way that your child going to be successful and that's by starting at the point that they're at  it's hard to have those higher expectations when you're beginning to social skills and then also you want to think about the environment are it does your child have a hard time attending will do i want to put them in a smaller room with you know a little distractions to that we can make sure that they are really paying attention to the topic at hand and getting all the material and additionally how can i remove those distractions and where where is my child going to need to use this scale so starting at the beginning you know do i need to make sure that my child is attending if they're attending great let's move on to that natural environment let's take them to an open gym time or the playground  skating rink or something along those lines where lots of kids are out in their natural environment and let's let's move onto that area if we're ready again you might start out small and it might be more controlled but your end all goal is getting them to that natural situation and making sure that they're really successful through every and the step fix is to remove motivational materials so remember that if peer interaction doesn't come naturally your child it's most likely because their peers are reinforcing to them so they're not finding their peers interesting and they're not therefore they're not wanting to interact with them oftentimes if your parents tell me that their child is a lot better with adults than they are with kids and i think a lot of the reason for that is because we we act so interested in everything that they're saying and of course that's what we want to do we want to encourage them to have interests and have goals in life but that's not something that their peers are necessarily doing the one thing you want to work on is remembering to condition those peers as really reinforcing for your child so what i mean by that is pairing your child it's peer with something that your child already really likes so for instance if your child has a favorite thomas toy that he loves and always has with him making that thomas toy only available when that here is over or making that thomas toy with the pier and having the pure give it to them or if the plate it coming over later that day not letting the thomas toy come out after school and only giving it when the peer comes over later that day really pairing those items together in time is what we mean by conditioning and pairing we want to make sure that  the peer is presenting that item and saying here this is what i have for you and i know you really like it so i'm bringing it for you because i want you to like me too with some was like when you go to a dinner party you bring food so that you know you're associating that when when she comes she brings the best dish so you it's putting things together in time and when we say establishing operations that's what we're kind of thinking of as well so if your child is motivated by  a particular video or getting a favorite nail polish at the store something along those lines making sure that they haven't had that in a while and a little bit of time prior to their play date if that's what they're working for or that's what they're going to get during their play date so if your daughter really likes to paint or nails bright pink making sure that her nails aren't bright pink prior to her play date because otherwise why would she need to do anything that you want to do during the playdate you want to really make sure that she can work to get that and participate with her peer in order to get that so here are some examples for this that we can break down a little bit more to you so bath time is not fun but bath time bath toys are fun so putting the bath toys with the bath time makes fun so really putting them together and really making that isolation so only getting bath toys when you're in the bath tub that that's really fun meeting probably not so fun but if you have donuts and coffee at your meeting it makes it a little bit more fun on and those two being paired together in time to your child so when you don't have your favorite thomas toy you really really want your favorite thomas toy so if your child associates a super valuable tool is with their peer that peer will then take on those qualities as well so it makes their peer really fun in will make them want to engage with them a lot more so for instance here we have something that is that we have a really great reinforcer but we have a really hard task so we my are paid to nail polish we want her to you know start a conversation with her friends verses having a reinforcer and no difficult task getting just getting pink nail polish never you want then you also have the example of playing with new toys and playing with it here or playing with old toys and playing alone so making sure that you're really making those distinctions between what is really reinforcing for a child which would be playing with a new toy and then they get to do it with the peer verses playing with old toys and playing alone because the old toys might not be a fun and step seven reinforced so with something they want to make sure of and remembers is that it's only a reinforcer if it actually increased is the probability that your child's going to do that behavior again so while we might think something is a reinforcer if your child is not doing it anymore after that one time then it's likely not a reinforcer fourth so if it if they're not crazy about a reward then it's probably not a reinforcer to the comic here says how are you finding our age and rewards him and he said very and rewarding so while you may call it a reward it might not actually function as a reward so often telling your son or daughter what they did was great kensi powerful but sometimes it's just not enough there needs to be something else in with their praise to get them to be really motivated about what they're stars points i've used tickets with kids any kind of a signal of putting together a you know a picture of their reinforce or a puzzle piece picture that that they would be able to trade in for something afterwards toys and items you could just give the toy the end of the task if your son or daughter doesn't need that visual feedback of how they're doing and then also you could give them minutes for something so if you don't want to take away the computer activity you can then give them minutes to engage with that computer activity so if you only typically get ten minutes a night let them earn minutes onto that if they've done a good job on their pla some examples of the feedback would be like i said the picture puzzle that we have there kind of the puzzle pieces from the bottom or having them have a dryness of coloring in a picture a part of the picture every time they've done a good job and once all colored in they get their trade in having a puff ball or a marble jar jar so filling that up every time and then it could be a big outing that they go on at the end of the month they could have a treasure chest so often we'll do treasure hunts with our students where we will hide things around our office and they have to go find the clues and then they end up finding a treasure box at the end that has all kinds of cool toys that they gets picked for them  then you could use your typical penny token or sticker charts and just put stickers on it every time they've done a good job make it really simple see you always want to be creative about your consequences in your reinforcers so you know special occasion trips to the toy store so trip somewhere special treats more privileges one on one time with a parent we have students that earn french fries every time they come to a group and do a good job and do specific things we also have students who get to take home comic books it really depends on your child and what you can be most creative with them for and of course we all know that those are awards won't always be there so how do you get rid of them once your child is doing it you don't want to be giving a comic every week to hey there's like seven bucks you want to make sure that you're really feeding that out and making sure that they can do this without that reward so in order to be truly effective it must last over time and be used in different settings in different ways so what we want to make sure we're doing is we're slowly pulling back from that reward system so if it first they're going to have comic book every week maybe they need to go two weeks with it before they get a comic book and say you know what you're doing so great so we're going to make a little bit more challenging i want to see if you can do it i need to go two weeks of play a good play dates before you can get that comic book now but really slowly doing it you might need to do you know a week and a half or a week in one day event just so that you're you're not losing that skill completely but you will eventually be able to faded out to where it's been a month and they get a comic book or it's been two months and they get a comic book or whatever your reinforcer may be but changing how often you're giving it is usually the easiest way to fade back from not keeping the demand the same but changing when you're giving that reward so expecting them to do a little bit more example that we have here in the first in the first phase we have a parent praising and drawing a coin and then giving five minutes with the toy once they get three points in the second phase here they've actually reduced the amount of time the child gets this can be a tough one because the kids are really smart and they they know when you're giving them five minutes versus when you're giving them one minute so this can be a tricky one so just keep that in mind that you could then fade it by the number of minutes you're getting so if you praise and then drop point and then make it one minute for every three coins so you could make it that they still get five minutes but they need a lot more koreans in this case to get that five minutes or and then you fade off and you're just praising them years telling them what a great job they did and this is of course a very quick and just an example of how it is you want to make sure that you're feeding reinforcement based on your child how are we doing on time oh awesome so there's a bunch of case studies in your pocket that will actually take you through everything that we talked about today since it's ten of eight so we have to leave thirty right ok so why don't we read through one that way we can if there's any questions on it before you guys would read through them on your own and cole and he is five so we're first going to assess so the tools that we're going to use for this are going to be on the left side of your screen they are going to be the violin's which is a parent questionnaire that you go through and rank your child in each area and then an observation so we're going to watch them do greetings we're going to watch them every time they see appear to degree them what are they doing what is that greeting look like do they just look at their friend and say i got i got a new race card today or did they say hi it's good to see you it's been so long i like your shirt what have you been up to before jumping in with their exciting news then the second thing we're going to do is we're going to write our goal in measurable of observable terms so we're going to say when someone says hi to call he will say hi or hello within two seconds and nine out of ten times so we want to make sure that cole is always saying hi when he sees a friend at least nine out of ten times sometimes you don't get the chance to say hi to someone before or you're close enough to someone so you don't have to say hi the minute you see them you can just kind of jump right back into what your conversation  was the next step we're going to do is kind of break that step down first we want to work on that one on one because he wasn't doing it when we looked at it in the beginning later we're going to have him work on it with peers and really make sure that he's always successful we're not going to thro him into a situation where he's not on a number form are going to choose a teaching tactic and we've decided here that we're going to use video modeling so we're going to set up the environment and before his instructor comes to his house  the dad is going to watch a video about greetings with him they're going to watch someone correctly greet appear in a video and then they when he calls teacher comes he's going to work on the greetings with his  teacher and we're going to use the motivational materials because she's his favorite teacher so he's more likely to do it with her because he really likes her and then we're going to reinforce so after he greets his wonder juan cole gets a mediately didn't earn the starnes chart if you it's four stars in a week he gets to earn a special trip to the library and that's really motivating for him because we we already we already figured that part out and we know that he's reinforced by it so again this will go through a few more case studies to hopefully bring all of the presentation together and help you understand the assessing and all of the steps to it and how we're choosing things again the teaching tactic i can't stress enough that it really does depend on your child and in order for any of this to be taken into account i would want to make sure that you have done all of these things of course we don't know your kid so it can be kind of hard for us but these are general guidelines that you can follow and if you i'm sure you all know your kids really well so will you be able to determine how they best where and so that is all that we have search and i i know that it's about eight o'clock so where more than happy to take any questions anyone has but you discuss amongst yourselves and then ask questions anyone have any questions right now so you know what to do in different situations and things like that so it would be definitely for anyone has one on one questions or anything like that feel free to come up we're than that so we are offered a home consultation which would mean that someone come out and do an assessment if you're having trouble with toileting if you're having trouble with the eating different things you're having trouble with social skills if you're having trouble with your child getting up and going to school in the morning or going to bed any of anything they are having trouble with we will come out we will pass and we will tell you how you can make it better our recommendation will be based on how your students do so it might just be that we're going to teach you initially how to do it or it might be like this as we meet my needs or break it down and have them work on it with a separate adult and really one on one and then we'll teach you how to do it for all of our stuff is geared towards really making sure that your child can be functional in your family environment and really are participate as an active family member in addition to that with the conservation would come of course instruction if it was recommended so we would them determine what goals they need to work on and then place them with a well matched year disclaimer we definitely want to make sure that we have a very good place prior to placing your child so sometimes it can take a little bit and together because i'm not just going to put your child in with someone who is not going to reciprocate their conversations so we talked about not wanting these skills to be punished in any way we want to make sure that we're really  make having the child be successful in everything they're doing in biking social interaction so in addition to the social skills groups we have our gap program and that is what is offered during the weeks when school is not in good friday we work on all those different skills as in the holidays falls some years but we work on different social skills throughout the day to right now it's been just offered for ages three to five but it's something that we want to offer for older kids you know the focus on the reinforcing the focus on success you know if there is an interest and if you know you know we don't want to always put our kids in from the t v but if if you set it up like some of the things that they were saying here you set it up ahead of time and you say oh ok they both love football or soccer whatever whatever it is you know and you get it and you say hey i'm kid so it'll come over and we're going to there's i have this really great video that we're going to we're going to watch you know maybe no more than thirty minutes and then i'm going to let the kids play you know and so it's focused around that interest and that kind of helps a bridge into success success you know if it speaks to your kids interest and then that success difference can make a huge difference in role model the beginning my daughter did go through social schools for with the with this group and the thing that i really love is getting that weekly feedback that literally came home with me every single week so i knew exactly what was what was happening or what we were doing it's very structure these are very very very structured but i can tell you that it does make a difference absolutely in this because it's it's very broken down to a very structured for the child and you can see that difference over time and if your child is on my period or my before if you've got some of that those kinds of issues as well it's very hopeful because you've got that information to share with your teachers at school absolutely with your your mean i don't want to give you the wrong answer that's you know as far as i'm legal responsibility for the school i'm not one hundred percent sure i know that the next presentation though if i had it there and there are a great involved there place if you are like oh my god what am i going to do here a starting place for you at your school would be your type counsellor you're your teacher but also that teacher helping you get to the guidance counselors a guidance counselor almost in i think that at least i don't think valid as a child so i would be very careful because they did a terrible job of like it so i would just be very careful and i'm looking back at like six grade and she did not get services that you know your kid there are by themselves and not working in a good is good enough and it's not so i am saying that every parent here get in there and try and do love let them get away with it because it's not acceptable so i'm going to piggyback off of your comment because the whole reason that we exist we are they don't want special education in violent council this is the reason we this and we are here parent volunteers and we as a parent group can come together to help each other battle some of these things that do come up for people because like your situation you know you've had a situation for you that's not been very good whereas i can speak for myself through the belmont school my situation has been pretty exemplary through the my schools and my child's been to well taken care of and my needs have been assessed the needs of been well taken care of up to this date she's in second  we'll see we don't know what's going to happen from now on and so this is where i'm just going to do a little plug because you know these things we hear all the time and the more that we can come together as parents and help each other i think the better that we if you have a situation and you want to put yourself out there you can be our confidential parent to parent list and if you are willing to talk to other parents about your situation when heather and i get a phone call or somebody comes and says i don't know what to do in order to go you know we will ask our what great what this what is this and we will try to pair you are with a parent that has maybe gone through a walk through you or your your situation or with your next step  so i just can't speak to that enough i mean we'd like to get more parents involved with one another but it's hard because you have to come forward and you have to be willing to do that so i just if you want to do that see one of us