we chose to take on is to help parents within the belmont community to help them with special education needs be a voice for special education  a support help parents come together and also provide care it's not for tootie for information flow and an education and so tonight is about information flow and education and we're very excited tonight this is a parent information session i will let you know that we try to sponsor a parent information session on a monthly basis with a different speaker and a different topic every month between the months of october through may i'm sorry october to april in may we have our award ceremony and on top of that the other things that we do as a council is that we also offer parent mingles on not just with before the speaker vents but we also offer a coffee tea at ten thirty a m in the morning at brewer's bagels at belmont center every third thursday so there will be an opportunity if you would like to come and talk with other parents of kids with special needs and you'd like to have more one on one conversations there will be an opportunity tomorrow morning at ten thirty am respectful and if you don't if you don't get an opportunity to do that one you can come once a month to third thursday and i usually put it up to the the other information flow that we feel is extremely important and we hope that you will do this to the we have a list or a yahoo group list serv and if you will go out to regular velma public website or if you just grab this flyer and it will tell you how to subscribe to that list or any information on the pair information session like dialogues orse little surveys that we want to know from parents information flow requesting for volunteer opportunities anything that we want to start talking with as a group  of parents this is the yahoo group that we work with so my suggestion if you're a new parent is that you get on that list serv because that's very helpful and i will let you also know i don't nag we don't advertise other council informations through the belmont list serves only advertise other council information through the yahoo group but we do send out arlington information lexington's information while times information as well so there's a lot of parent education and peer information systems available to you if you get on that yahoo group there's a lot more that you can educate excited to have made it come and do this presentation for you i can't speak for heather but i can speak for myself this information was very invaluable for me to work with my daughter in those early years and i am still i will tell you upfront no honestly i'm still she's a second grader now and she's doing great i am still using the tools that nato introduced us to back then today so they are definitely tools that i feel can be  utilized whether your child has special needs or not i think these two going to grow the gamut in fact i will tell you i have a regular fourteen year old that cherry middle school and i have a eighteen year old and although they are they don't look like this the concepts of what neda is going to talk to you about if you think creatively you can even get visuals for those interested so i have trust me i use a lot of it so nate i don't know if there's any other thing that i can say about neda she's works in brookline she works in i'll let you do that already but she's a great great great resource and we're so happy to have her well thank you going to turn it o there thanks so yes i work in brooklyn and i am behavior specialists in brooklyn's early childhood program and i've been working with children on the autism spectrum for over forty years  and from preschool pre print school from about two years old through adulthood so i have a lot of very valuable experience and one of the things i developed a number of years ago was a course for parents in behavior management it's a ten week course and i do it in many different towns and this is how i met heather and mary jo is belmont invited me to come do the class for them so i had ten wonderful weeks with them and their children and i think out of that one of in particular one of the sessions i think you felt would be very very valuable to share with everybody so that's kind of the background of  got here tonight so welcome everybody i know that i don't know that there's enough handouts so you are taking people's e mail to send it to them  kind of go through the power point and i'm going to save questions till the end but if there's something that i'm talking about that you have a burning question at the moment i'm very flexible i don't mind having you know kind of a little bit of conversation the problem with that if we stop and we get sidetracked too often then i don't get through the whole thing so i'll kind of gauge my time and i think if i feel like we have enough time to kind of chat a little bit that will be fine and if you need to leave or i know you know if your phones are on i don't mind i feel like when families have children sometimes there can be emergencies so you know i can appreciate that you might have an interruption i don't mind that  o tonight the specific topic that i'm talking about is using visual supports for behavior management and i just want to start out by talking about what i'm going to do talking about what our visuals how play is visuals to prevent behavior problems and then how can we use visuals to manage behavior and then i have some resources for you all so visually cued instruction is basically any type of visual that aids instruction it's that simple pictures photographs the written word video when i started out in this field we didn't have the kind of technology that we do now and so many children even at the youngest age you know they actually i wanted to do wanted to get an idea of who you guys are so how many of you are professionals i know that there were a few teacher teacher ok and the rest of your parents i'm guessing and how many you have children under seven years old and over seven so a few ok i'm guessing that nobody here has children much older than ten is that right ok just in terms of you know why you're here tonight because i think we talked about it was kind of preschool through fifth grade so then ok great so this information can be tailored up or down so if you see something that you think is interesting but you think it's too young for your child or for your child and you wan again what reminded me about asking you all who you are so many children today very young ages know how to work computers i pads how to go on an i pad go to the apps pick out an app that they like find things on you tube that they learn from and you know it's just amazing the have they can maneuver through all the technology because i know i can so the use is a visually cute instruction are many these are some one is organized in the environment so i guess the other question i have is i know people have children with varying disabilities that are here but how many of you have children who would you would say have social communication challenges and just behavior challenges so those of you ok so the so the us visuals has many purposes but oftentimes children who have communication challenges don't get enough out of just listening to a word or are to speaking and oftentimes children who process language at a slower pace by the time the information comes in it's kind of lost almost so visuals are static they don't they aren't flowing like language so because of that static they are children are able to grasp concepts that they may not be able to grasp if they didn't have some kind of visual support so in organizing the environment enhancing communication instructional information teaching social and play skills especially to younger children improving understanding a lot of children don't understand the word but when they see the visual paired with the word they understand what it is that an expectation might be  preparing for transitions which is a huge issue for many people how many of you have children who have troubles with transitions so that's often a huge issue and then adding concrete meaning to abstract concepts and all of those things help improve behavioral control so if children have an understanding of the expectation if they understand what is what to do how to do it they get it alleviates and also how to communicate it alleviates a lot of behavioral issues so the first area that i want to talk about is consistency and routine so this is kind of how i did my thinking there are a lot of things you can do before you get involved in behavior problems sometimes there are a lot of things you can do to save your problem so first i want to talk about how those things can help manage behavior even before you get into a situation where you may have some behaviors and then i will talk a little bit about some kind of if you will behave your programs that you could try so the first thing is consistency and routine and with children having predictability is really important when things keep changing it can be very confusing for children and when children don't know the expectation  i would say even when you have a teenager and you know you have an eighteen year old if they don't understand or know what you're what's expected of them then they're going to make mistakes and then sometimes those mistakes can get them into trouble and at a young age it when they don't when children don't understand what's expected sometimes they make up their own things to help them be more in control so i'm just going to give you example have so much experience with different age groups and children  and i had i was working for so before i went to brooklyn i was doing a lot of consultation around the greater boston area and i was working in one of the schools and i was working with a little girl who i probably started consulting when she was and maybe third grade and by the time this story i'm going to share with you was when she was in fifth grade and the teachers in the classroom were having a special time where they had teenagers from the high school she was in fifth grade classroom the girl had a diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum and cognitively she did a really nice job in school but you know socially she had a lot of challenges and also in terms of her communication your hallmarks of children on the autism spectrum and so this on this particular day there were high school students coming and they were talking about sad which is students against drunk driving and the  plan was for her not to be in the classroom but she happened to come in and if anyone prepared her and kind of gave her a script and told her what the expectations were she could do beautifully in any situation but this was novel she didn't know what to do she comes into her classroom everybody sitting in a circle so she kind of plows through the group and first it's on somebody slap and then you know is explained you know place you know sit on the floor next to us she sees her peers raising hand her their hands and asking questions and so she raises her hand and does and they call on her and then she said i have a tooth i had a tooth ache last night and mommy gave me medicine and it helped me and then she asked for a break and she left well every time she came back she did that same exact routine because she didn't have the expectation if someone had written a script for her and said when you you know you can ask one question raise your hand and say is it safe to drive drunk she would have known what to do she would have been able to be part of the group in a more effective way but because there wasn't an expectation she developed her own routine and i think that that's a really important thing just to hold on to is that routine is important it's important in every aspect of the day getting ready for school getting ready for bed getting ready for meals what comes before meals what comes after meals what do you do in your spare time all of those things are part of daily routine so  so you know i basically set all of this that is that it helps establish consistency routines give predictability create consistent opportunities for practicing skills build independence help reduce anxiety which is a really big component so a lot of children when again when they are anxious and they don't know what to do they kind of create their own things to do and sometimes those things are not always safe or  within kind of the parameters of positive behavior and when you have all of these things in place one positive behavior leads to another positive behavior leads to another positive  so when you sit down and set up a routine you want to start by really thinking about what the big task is so even if we're talking about brushing your teeth if you think about how you brush your teeth every every time you brush your teeth you have a routine i know for me i turn on the water i put my toothbrush into my little motor toothbrush i've put the toothpaste on my toothbrush i brush my teeth until the little happy face comes on i rinse off my tooth brush i rinse out my mouth i turn off my water i do it exactly that way every single time that's my routine for brushing my teeth and even as simplistic as that sounds children need to have that kind of consistency around all of the things that they need to do and especially because just think about it if they have the routine and they get it down pat they can be more what independent so you know and that's what we always want for our children starting from a very young age we want to give them opportunities to be independent and to grow and flourish so often times visuals can support that and can support the independence and arranging of the materials and the environment to support a routine means that there's an example so there's a routine for coming into the house and perhaps it's you know you put your shoes in the and then there's a code right there that tells you this is where i put my code and i know in our classrooms so mostly what i do and in brookline is i work with in the classrooms who have children who are substantially separate children with an autism diagnosis so i do and i collaborate home and school so that's what i do and so you know we have we know when the children walk into the classroom and i don't know how many of you get to take your children to school you often probably will see there's a very specific area that's theirs that is not changing one day from the next that there is a place for them to put their belongings that there is a routine for them perhaps to sign in or to designate that they're in school or to somehow and there's something that they do when they walk into the classroom that's the routine and it doesn't change from day to day unless there's something very special or different here so and the same thing can happen for when they come home you know they put their book bag here they put their shoes they put their jackets or whatever else they may have here maybe they take their snack bag or their lunch bag out and they bring it into the kitchen there could be different ways but there can be and when you have visuals and i have tons of examples to share with you you might have like little visual depictions of you know take off your shoes hang up your coat bring your you know put your book bag down get your lunch bag bring it to the kitchen and so so the first thing in setting up routines is to have visual schedules and the nice thing about them is that they're very inexpensive you don't need to  most in the schools and i think probably a lot of you has seen the visual depictions they're called board maker and their picture graphs of three thousand different things of every everything that originally it was a communication system for people who didn't have speech and in research we found that children with autism often get greater understanding with using these visuals and then it kind of had a ripple effect of their children with other types of special needs and and even typical children so you know many of the classrooms that i've consulted to are a child with a different type of disability and inclusion type of classroom and we would set something up for the child everyone in the classroom would benefit from it all the other children would benefit from seeing the same type of visuals that the child with special needs and and they appreciated it because it made it clearer for them to know what they needed to do click you know brushing teeth and there are five thousand pictures that show and then you can pick one that looks like the best for your particular child and what they would understand they're easy to make and all you need are the pictures some glue tape or velcro we use a lot of velcro in my business construction paper or a file folder poster board sometimes people put schedules in a photo album and then every time you're done you just turn the laminating paper help she protectors and or magnetic picture frame so all of those things are helpful in terms of developing schedule so here's just one example and if you look at this one you see that every thing is every activity is broken down further so the first one is that he wakes up he gets out of bed he puts on his robe he puts on his slippers then he goes to the bathroom he uses the toilet he washes his hands he dries his hands then he more preferred so say you know again i work with a lot of children who are in preschool so toileting is just a huge thing that we work on and so i'd say it's just not really a preferred activity so first you do that and then you get your snack and then you do puzzles puzzles are ok and i don't mind doing puzzles but i much prefer watching a video so then you know getting a video after you're doing something that is  preferred so this would be a way of setting up something positive following something that's not as much fun so you can set up schedules that way as well so this next one is is a first then board and first then boards are helpful in many many different ways but first then boards and this is very simplistic but again we can't you can use things like this for even older children and if you have somebody who reads you don't need to have this you know picture visuals but you can do something like at home so first you clean up and then you get a vision of a video and they're also right for anybody have children who have issues around eating a variety of foods ok so i've used something like this it's all right you know there's always one in every crowd so i use something like first now i wouldn't put an entire plate of broccoli on my child's play i would take a piece of a piece of a piece a little teeny teeny piece and then usually it's i don't i probably do have a cookie picture somewhere but it's some more preferred food and so you start with something that's less preferred and then grabs and you reinforce it by something that's more preferred and then over time you increase the amount of the left for preferred and you decrease the amount of the more preferred does that make sense to you so that you know i know a lot of children there are some people who are you know feeding specialists and what they say is it takes something like five hundred presentations of a particular food before a child will accept it we also do things like first you learn to kiss the food or just touch it to your lips and then kiss it and then lick it and then touch it to your teeth and gradually like not literally in one session but over time so you touch it to your mouth you know like ten times and then when you can comfortably do that then you kiss it and then when you can comfortably do that then you lick it and gradually you introduce the food so and you know depending on different things and there are different ways to introduce food food preferences is a really often a very big challenge for a lot of children so this is just one way that's a possibility  if you do if then sometimes it's it's like you don't really have to do it if you do it then you can have this but the first is you're doing this then this is happening all in the nice thing about all using visuals for anything is it takes the contention away from you i'm not saying do this the board telling you you know this is saying eat your broccoli and then and then you get your videos so it really is amazing how when you introduce the videos to something that has been contentious near just shaking your head so she's had that experience he that you know that it takes it just takes that you know fight away from from the parents and the child at yes you can be as creative as you want and it's you know i think i love for children to have choices i think it's a really important thing and i have some things i have examples of different choices for different kinds of things but you might do the choice first like what do you want to you know you you know we're going to eat your broccoli do you want a cookie or do you want to play a game or do you want you know so you can vary what kinds of you know things happen following the thing that is the most important about doing that is that you have to make sure that is really something that the child really is interested in or else why bother you know and and sometimes it's a real battle to really figure it out so i don't know if anybody well i would say it just depends i can't just give you a flight answer for that because every child is different and every reason for not doing the routines are different they might not do the routines because of the way it's set up they don't understand the routine they might not like the routine so you have to figure out what part of it they don't like and try and fix those pieces to make it more comfortable for them so say it's cutting your nails are getting a haircut or brushing your teeth or things that a lot of children have sensory issues about so if if you know that that's a possibility then then there are things that you can do to desensitize like the mouth before you brush teeth or their hair before they head before you get a haircut or there's ways to practice so that's one way another way is to use something like the schedule that has something less preferred something more preferred so when you're done with your routine this wonderful thing is going to happen and if you want that wonderful thing you just need to do it and to try and take away that you know on making you do this you know this is follow your schedule you need to follow your schedule you need to follow your routine and for a lot how old is your child seven so i think still for seven year olds that can work it's your your schedule says it's time for this and you know i think being a professional makes it you know it's like of course so much easier in some ways i mean we have our challenges too and you know they're the same children that give you a challenge give professionals a challenge you know we don't it's but we kind of have in our back pocket a lot of different strategies that we learned over the years and we can just at the seat of our pants kind of pull them out and parents don't have that option oftentimes you just kind of get stuck and because you can get so frustrated with what's happening at the moment even though you might have some of the strategies in your back pocket it all goes out the window because you're you know in the middle of this huge tantrum or in the middle of this big refusal but you know my advice around something like that is to always try and remain as calm and neutral as unaffected as possible because if you show after that then you're teach your child if you really want to get to me this is the way you that you so  that would be another thing that would be you know want to do your routine that's what your schedule says you want your ice cream tonight you're going to do your routine if that kind of you know that's the message by your behavior so the next thing is what i call a time board and i have lots of examples of times where it's very i am going to your guys are going to get to hear some of the same stories about how i discovered these things i was working with a seven year old girl who who was having piano lessons she was one of four children and all of her siblings were getting piano lessons and her mother and father wanted her to have piano lessons too so i was working in the in the home with the family and when i was there for the first piano lesson and she sat down at the piano with the piano teacher she had no clear expectation of what was supposed to happen she really didn't know and so within minutes she bit the piano teacher and it dawned on me that she had no sense how long this was going to last was going and i get to be sitting at this bench for one hundred years or five seconds and i don't know so i made this little chart for her and it said piano piano piano and every five minutes we took a piano picture down from the chart and she could see that when all the pictures were done the piano lesson would be done so something that was completely open ended and very challenging and unexpected became something that she could that was close and that she could figure out and unfortunately i don't know why some of the board maker pictures didn't translate but i have examples but this would be an all done picture and the way that we would use it versatile and let me tell you that you can use it really to older children with older children you can do you can you could you do something different than numbers you could write you could write words of you know one two three four and as each thing is accomplished you cross them out but the way to the we would do something like this would be just one example and i'm going to give you many five more minutes  when i started doing these i was always doing it all done and then i met a friend and they marisa and was she wasn't all done with whatever was she would have a tantrum so we did stop for her and so again versatility you know and you individualize for the trial so in five more minutes it's going to be time to stop the computer and children often don't have that sense of time so they don't necessarily know for more minutes than can be all done and then you get the idea how many minutes does it take you know how many of you have kids getting up and down from the dinner table well when the numbers are all done we can get up from the dinner table so five minutes we're sitting at the dinner table four minutes and then it's time to be all done at the dinner table five more bites five five five four by three b can use it for something that is challenging for your child that you want to try and have your child be with longer you can use it when children are waiting and waiting can be so challenging because when does it really end you can use it for you know a lot of times at work in classrooms we do you do you need to do five more of these and then your work will be all finished so even if home say you're worth working with your child and you're doing a puzzle or you're doing a few things and you want your child to kind of just be sitting in concentrating on something other then a computer or an i pad you might have you know we have five things and we have four things then we have  three things to them one so there's lots of lights you know diversity so you know sometimes you might put you know the subject that you're working on so we have to write in five four three two one and then it will be finished see these guys are still well loved to their run so this one is you do it like this and this is another thing that again the contention is taken away you're not going up to your is on the computer or the i pad or whatever he's doing and saying it's time to stop you're showing him that when all the pictures are turned over it will be time to stop so you have this ability to take something open ended and make it close and it takes something that's highly preferred that you know is going to be a challenge to get rid of and make it into something that's concrete and give your child enough warning for a transition this is works beautifully for transitions and then i have another one that's a fan favorite i mean people have trouble with this  so the same type of thing this one i have that one of the parents and one of my my parents horses did and she had children who could watch videos all day long so this is t v or video and this was in the old days when you actually had the tape and you put them in the t v it was just so great that i've saved it anyway so after this they had their first video they put it in and they knew that one was done and then they would have a second one and then when the second one was done it was no longer a fight so i don't know like you can do it for things like if your child is constantly asking say i pad and you say it's ok to have the i pad but you only want them to have it twice a day for a certain amount of time so you could do something like i pad and then when you know you could put one in then the other all done and then all i pad is all done and again it's it makes the expectation completely clear the child knows what's expected they know what's going to happen you're not fighting with them about it they're just ok it's done and so she the when the when she made this she told us adorable story that on this particular snowy day she had the kids home with her and they had watched their two videos and she said ok well guess what you can watch another when they were like no we've already seen our two videos so she really learned and then you know i just use this one as well because it's just like for you if you think your child is going to get the concept of having five four three two one then you can use something that's more concrete like buttons and all the buttons are gone it's time to go and you can do like just drop boxes you know and color in boxes you know there's just you know i have these because these are the kinds of things that i often would use but that's not how you have to do it again you can child knowing what resources you have and then putting things together i always find that one of the challenges with many children is that they don't have the proper communication when they're in trouble some spot so instead of being able to communicate what's going on they will have some kind of behavioral episode so i just say these are the basics i feel like these are the things that children really need to be able to comprehend and do so i need help i don't understand i feel and some just very basic feelings of happy sad  mad i don't want it or no thank you and i need a break so many times just if you just give them a few minutes to you know kind of get away and regroup they can come   meter is something that i use and it's interesting because we have d'apice too but you know with some children we just want to teach them when they are being appropriate so again i'm just going to remind you that all these things that i'm talking about often help before you get the behavior so before your child escalates to be too loud or before you know there's a problem with something they're saying or doing so this one is like if you have a child that is either to apply it or two out and the way that something like this is used is twofold one is to teach and one is to remind so if your child is actually you know when your child is talking just right you would say you know that's exactly just right voice good for you and then if they're too quiet you can say that's too quiet can you try just right or you know oh that's too out you try just right so you can use it both ways just to remind you know the level of speaking the other way can be used i was just having a conversation with the teacher just the other day and she was saying that one of her students is actually saying some very mean things to other people in the classroom and she feels like there's some level of intention with the way she's doing it just to see you know i guess a reaction and and it's  really starting to hurt feelings and so we talked about using kind of an adaptation of this you know that's a friendly thing to say and that's not a friendly thing and so when she's saying you know something nice to a friend or an adult and say that was a really friendly thing to say and then when she's not that's not a friendly thing to say and then you try to say that say something friendly so you can use something like this that way as well this is just my favorite you know there are many things that children do that are oftentimes very repetitive i'm not a big person but there are sometimes if you have a visual reminder so i'll just give you some examples i've put this next to light switches for on off on off on off on off i've put this on the toilet and somebody likes to see what happens with the life of something is down the toilet like you know toys or you know stuffed animal or whatever it is i put it on the countertops to remind children not to climb up on the countertop i put it bannister's through my children not to slide down the banister it's just a visual way of saying this is just not ok and it's almost like that little stop sign with the x through it which is a similar thing and this is one of the board make a board maker has several versions of no but i like this one because i feel like the sad face and it makes it very clear in the acts makes it really clear to you know don't go  there this is just a way of giving children an option of what they can do when they get upset so sometimes i get upset i can relax i sit in my special place i put my hands in my lap i take five press i'm ready to try again so this is something that you know we we used to teach a replacement behavior so oftentimes children because they don't have something to do to get what they need they have you know challenging behavior but if you can teach them something that replaces that behavior and that they can use and get the same result then you you're golden so if you can teach them a strategy to help them calm down instead of crying and tantrum and have a large meltdown that can be really helpful so this is just another visual strategy of being able to do that and something like this i would probably do back to back actually so if i had a child that was hitting i might remind them that there's no hitting and then turn it around and say your words and you can again do it  you can do it either using just you know written words or visuals and then this next one is again kind of a replacement behavior so  on the top it's like if you get upset you you know we don't want to see you crying we don't want to see you you know banging on the desk you can sit quietly and put your head down you can howard quite a ways and i use this in different ways but you know just one story was a little girl that i was working with who especially when she was out in the community she was if she didn't want to be there she would have a big problem and she in a form like this and so when we would be it would be like when you're out with mommy you know right away you know scream and cry we can and then she could you know pick one of those things are all of those things to do and it really was very helpful for her to be able to get her behavior back under control because if we gave her options of what she could do and not what she could and that's just another point i think that's really important is so many times we use you know you can't do this and don't do that and stop stop stop but we don't give children the option of what they can do so i always am in favor of if you're going to use those words don't do that stop doing that you can't do that to say this is what you can do so you always try and do the positive part of you know this is ok this is not ok or this we use a lot of a lot of language around expected and suspected so  this i developed for about i think he was the fifth or sixth grader and he had he was a very smart young guy but he had not such a that wasn't appropriate at the time so he would do these kinds of things and he would also say very inappropriate things because he had a lot of access to media and sometimes he would hear something and because he didn't always understand what he was hearing he would take that of saying of something out of context and use it in a very pro in appropriate way so the other thing about this is that we tried a lot of different types of behavior management plans to help him with that behavior and i just was not happy because we weren't getting the kind of success and you know so we figured out you know maybe we should just tell him what the results are going to be if he does one thing or another so we made this i need this flow chart i say we because i make them and then the teachers use them so they have part parcel of it or parents use them  so is it it is it inappropriate to do or say if the answer is yes i can say it i can do it i might get into trouble and then nobody will be proud or happy of with or i can think that i can say i'm too cool to do that i won't get into trouble and ever proud and happy and if it's not inappropriate then i can say it and i can do it and everybody will be proud and happy and i've done these kind of  flowchart or different types of things and again this is one of those things that can be very simplified or you know like a little more sophisticated but you know just again an example of taking something all the way through to the end of where it can go and explaining the outcome of you know behavior in either way so i just want to do one more this is a contract and this was it's this is the it's the some of this if then so this is one of those times when i would use if then if i go on the playground and i slide and i run and i play with my friends and i get to stay on the playground if i push or hit kick rocks or throw rocks then playgrounds going to be over and the way we would do it is usually we would have interestingly enough one of the parents that i'm working with right now she's had a huge challenge months in the making of her little guy to get into bed and go to sleep on his own and it took laying down with him and then  then sitting in a chair next to him and gradually moving the chair closer and closer to the door and now she's actually in the hallway at a little desk with a light she actually can sit and do things in the evening but he was getting out of bed getting out of bed getting out of bed getting out of bed over and over again and she said i hate to say this but i would get so frustrated that what i would do is i would close the bedroom door and then that made both of us miserable because he would be so upset and i would feel terrible but i got to a point where i knew if i threatened him with it and i don't believe in threats at all but you know and she would follow through so it really wasn't a threat he would stay in bed so i said well you know you some nights you might feel like you can put up with that twenty five times and other nights you might have a headache and you think after the third time you're ready to shut the door so why don't we make it in some kind of concrete way where we can let him know if he stays in bed the door stays open and if he gets out of bed the door will close and we made a little visual with numbers on the bottom and he understands if you're in bed the door is open when he gets out of bed she takes off a number if you do it three more times and then i have to close the door so he's actually in control of what he's doing and she said she's not having to take any numbers off at all anymore and he completely gets it he knows that you know what the deal is what the rule is and it's and it's become systematic so it's not like her mood or his mood it's ok this is the rule you have some chances but when you use up all the chances this is what's going to happen so you decide if you want the door open or close by and it works really nicely so the next thing i want to talk about ok so all of the things that i just talked about are things that you can do in the environment to help your child from actually having the behavior issues but guess what they don't always work all of the time so now sometimes i need something to help my child control his behavior so one of the things that we do is we develop our reward program that i call a puzzle program and the reason i call it a puzzle program is because it involves actually making a puzzle and so basically what you have is you have a framework and on that framework you have a behavior that you're trying to work on that your child know what it is that you are targeting we don't want you to have tantrums and the way that you do this is you would decide at how many how often your child is usually having a tantrum and then you try and figure out a period of time that you know your child will be successful so say you happen to have a child  tantrums ten times a day which is you know almost every hour it might be short but it's like rows to the floor screens in picks refuses to do anything and then you know after five minutes or ten minutes they get up and they're ok and they move on so you decide well i want to avoid that so at forty five minutes i'm going to give them a reward and then to do this so that that they get they know that in you know in a certain amount of time they're going to get the rewards so try to practice them at least ten minutes does it resist making sense to you guys you give them a piece of a puzzle and you start i always guess what they earn an a lot of folks are against using food rewards one of the reasons words from some children not all children are so effective is because when you're done eating it it's gone whereas if you're on the i pad and you have to get off the  so yeah so it's nice when you're going to do a puzzle program like this to do it with the time with some kind of timing device so that the child can hear oh i've done i've been good for this ten minutes i haven't had a tantrum i get one of my puzzle pieces and then the problem is everybody asks what if they have a tantrum in the middle of getting their puzzle pieces don't take the puzzle pieces off all you do is you just wait till they're playa you wait till they're settled you wait till they're back into their routine and then you start the next interval of time with every ten minutes five minutes sometimes we do two minutes sometimes we do fifteen minutes is just in individualized and depending on the child and the child's you know rate of success and what they can tolerate and what they're able to do so that's kind of just the basic board of how a puzzle w put what the behaviors are on the puzzle why i used to do them this way so i worked i worked in a program for a number of years for it with adolescents and adults on the autism spectrum and  who had very serious behavior very very serious behavior and i had a young man who was maybe in his early twenty's and he was very involved he didn't have speech at the time and  is also a number of years ago really before we had the kind of technology and even the way we use visuals now to teach language so you know he was limited in access as well as limited ability to  was and so i made puzzles like this and one had a picture of vic spade and one had a picture of pine sol and he would get a choice for his interval of time that he would get to earn them and he would pick either the pine sol or the vicks vapor rub and then at whatever intervals it was five minutes he would we would color in a box and when the boxes were all  and during that time he would be having demands he would be asked to do work he would be asked to do is some type of a job and when he finished coloring depending on what he had chosen if it was pine so he put it in a big a little capsule in a big bucket of water and he had a sponge and you could just kind of sift it and you know wash tables and enjoy it and if we put a little under his nose and he could smell it and it made him really happy and it worked very effectively for him then i met a friend named billy who was probably at the time it was maybe five or six years old and billy just had no clue when we would try to do something like this and billy taught me that i needed to let him know what he was working for so that's kind of when i changed the whole concept of you know doing the puzzle programs just from you know this is going to be your reward to always making sure that your child knows what they're working for so and this actually billy's original original programs which actors and and again these programs are very very effective for stemming behavior this one one of the moms and one of my paragraphs made and she had a bunch of boys and she was expecting i think it was either her third fourth one was on the way to dinner was really a challenge so these these are called doodle learn and i have the the recent the resource on one of the power points and in your packets so she got this picture of dinner and every few minutes a dinner she would just put a puzzle piece on you're doing a great job you're sitting and eating your dinner and again and she was able to extend the time that they sat at the dinner table she was able to get them to eat their dinner and then they knew that if they sat and they filled in their puzzle they would get a deser another example is just a small one so this one is more portable easier to carry around and this was a friend who did some pitching and when they earned all of their little pieces they could go to the playground so something like that and also this one my approach is if it's not hurting anybody then it's it's ok to do as long as nobody's getting hurt then you know why not go for it just another example so this is another no herding one and then this friend  and then this one was more general so you know maybe he would get a choice or maybe sometimes we have a little choice box like you know a treasure box it has all kinds of little things in it that they can choose to to interact with for just don't have enough time to finish up and then you questions if you have any so another very common program is like a sticker program i don't know how many people have tried the program so they try and keep your hand up if they work ok well that's good now the reason they work is either because you've done it right or because they love stickers if you have a child that doesn't like stickers and that's all they're earning whatever you're rewarding to not more than three behaviors and then the idea is that anything can be traded in so like this is a poker chip and so this could be this is you know everything's going for a very nice kind of way to you know earn a token is is by having you know these little chips and one when you get all  of your and this one says swings but again this might be a time where children have choices about what they're going to earn so you would set it up so that before the reward purity you would say what are you working on what you want to work for i want to work for swing ok and if you have a child that can't voice what they want then again that's another time where visuals are very helpful but they can point to a visual of what they want to and so this has another component that i do it that i don't have but it was  some things very similar with points systems and start so if you have children i don't have a good example unfortunately of a point system or or a star chart i look through my stuff and i could not find one but yes and and you know the concept is like for something that could be more sophisticated so you might say that there are trade times so maybe every hour they count up their pebbles and if they only two pickles they can only learn these things so there's a menu is everybody following so you know so if you have fifty pebbles at the end of your hour you can you know maybe there's really something fantastic and and for older kids we do things like no more free night of homework or pizza party night or you know video kinds of things ideally we like to have immediate reinforcement but for older children they can kind of wait for a little bit later time is really sophisticated you can do you know you can based on allowance like if you have you know over the course of a week the thing that you that it's really important to remember is that one whatever you're go where you know you're going to get to go on the t v and they happen to earn their token and you know eight p m before bedtime you're not going to dress them up and take them out to the t v so you want to make sure that there are things that they can earn a media sometimes it helps to have a variety where they can trade in their pebbles but they have some leftover that they can bank for a really good bigger thing so i had a dad in one of my parent classes and he decided he was going to do the star chart with his daughter and what he wanted her to do was he wanted her to independently do all of the routine for bedtime so and he knew she could do it and so he decided he made a little star char and he wrote down he called it her numbers if you do all your numbers before bedtime you can earn maisie if you get three stars you can earn amazing every at the end of every d it didn't work why because she got the great prize after just three times you don't want to make the prize so big and so fabulous for a little bit of work you really want them to be able to earn a month is motivating enough or if the prizes are motivating you know so you know again all this stuff is so individualized and and you know i could probably spend an hour and a half just talking about talking programs so i just wanted to give you kind of a taste and idea  but i had a good friend of mine who actually went to teach in the middle of the year middle school and she was i think the third or fourth teacher you know this is now january that had stepped into this position and she you know after a few days she said i don't know what to do these kids are really challenging and you know do you have any ideas so scatter they decided on a list of behaviors that they thought would be acceptable in their classes and every day they would decide as a group if the group met the contingencies of what they had established for appropriate behavior and at the end of the week if they were you know if they had you know so many days of appropriate behavior she was going to treat them to chinese food or pizza or tacos or something and literally in weeks the kids were all shaped up and she didn't need to use it after that you know it's like anything that you do that i would call our official like a token program like a puzzle program the goal is that you're using it for you know to try and eventually not have to use it that th behaviors become part of the child's repertoire in a natural way and that the outside environment and and all the praise and feeling good that goes with in having positive behavior is what takes over the motivation but think about yourselves and think about motivation for yourself you know and what makes you tick and what you're willing to work for how many people would get up and go to you know their job every day if it was just for fun besides me but you know i think it's you know it's really an important piece of all of us we all need to be motivated and you know understanding what motivates your child and some for some that's a very huge challenge but once you get that it's really you know all of this other stuff kind of falls into place so this is just how you would set up a basic tocome program again i would also put on that the behaviors that you're working on so you know more like this here's the tokens they've been kept in here these are the things that are being worked on when you fill up your board  this is a chart that we use for a little guy again the pictures just didn't translate but i just wanted you to be able to see the concept so i need to remember no hurting place and listen to teachers or you know listen to parents when i am blank stickers i can't r and then so he could choose every day what he's working for and you know this breaks down the schedule so you know say it's you know morning then you know coming home from school dinner time after dinner bath time bed time and then the behaviors and you can start with so i think if i'm counting right there are eighteen boxes so even if you want to start with fifty percent so at the end you can put a nine there and after a couple of weeks of better behavior then you raise it to ten to twelve i never expect one hundred percent from any person all of the time so the maximum i would ever say would be either sixteen or seventeen out of the teen because everybody has a time where they're not doing as well or feeling as well or you know they just need a little break and i don't think any of us are one hundred percent every minute of every day it just isn't  that sometimes here it is so like this little guy loved balloons so he got blue stickers and sometimes we have a chart of spelling out what you know board so this one says good and then the reward would go here but sometimes you know i've done programs where it's bells whatever the child's we're working for so it might be c o m p u t e r time you know and so it's about the  dot com is another web site that has visuals on it and i think it's now thirty nine ninety nine a year you get access to a larger vocabulary of visuals but there are a number several hundred actually a free ones and they break them down into different categories so there are some like for all kinds of daily living skills and like you saw the one i showed you around dinner time visual aids for the powerpoint and so if you didn't get a copy of the powerpoint let heather or mary joe know and they'll get one timers which again are very appropriate there's something called the time timer i don't have it as an example but it's a cl and it has a little red flag and actually there's an app for them for your phone so there's all the time timer application and you pull down this little red tag and it's six steps for sixty minutes and you so as you i know you can't really see it that well but what happens is as the time decreases the red decreases and so when the red is all gone your child knows that the time is up for something so it's like those time boards is just another visual way of expressing you know again putting a very abstract con cept into a very concrete form and if you can figure out you know a lot of times my work with children really comes down to that i really think about the big picture and then i just it's almost like a fraction how you take it down to its lowest denominator i pare it down and i pare it down and i pare it down  and i try and think of the most basic elements of something so that a child can basically understand what it is that i'm trying to you know express to them and what the expectation is digital timers timers and then schedules some resources for schedules are it's called the first then visual schedule and it's in h d and it's at the i tunes store one two three visual schedule is at the i tunes store and you can get it on and then choice works i don't know if anyone has any questions ye t i think the answer is it depends on what you're using them so i have and with some of my families i work with a visual schedule a breakdown  of the different components over the sink there might be a visual of hand washing there might be a visual of toothbrush you know i might use a visual sometimes i'll take visuals and put them on a little so it's like you know the binder rains and the directions on the sit down quiet stand up come here whatever a direction might be because if i'm telling a child something and there are engaged in something and not really processing