Busyknitter

After much procrastination, yesterday I took a deep breath, emptied my piggy bank and took T for a 2-hour consultation at the PECs communication clinic, which is at Pyramid Education Consultants main UK office in Brighton. It just so happened that the consultant who did the session for us was one of the course presenters in Liverpool a couple of weeks ago.

The main objectives of the session were to assess what stage T is at and identify any particular issues to focus on and also to assess my skills in implementing PECs.

Not an auspicious start, as T was in a right ratty mood. He’d had a major, major meltdown earlier in the day and the two of us were still fairly frazzled from that. So for the first 20 minutes he was quite grumpy and uncooperative. You see T hasn’t had any difficulty in understanding the principle of the exchange. I also think (and the PECs lady agrees with me) that he will learn to differentiate between different picture symbols quite easily. His problem is that he just can’t be bothered unless it’s something he really, really wants and it’s made fairly easy for him. So most of the session was spent making the exchange a little bit harder each time, such as getting him to go round a table or cross the room.

The other issue with T is that so far no-one has been able to motivate him to do an exchange for anything other than food; not us, his LSA or his SALT. And that was the breakthrough. By the end of yesterday’s session he was readily running round the table to exchange for all sorts of cool toys. It was just a matter of finding something that got him going. And in T’s case that proved to be shaving foam! Every time he handed over the card, we would squirt a dollop onto the table and T would gleefully dive in and coat himself in it!!!!! I’ve honestly never seen him look so happy and switched onto a game.

The one big lesson for me is that when I get home, I’m going to have to try really hard to clear out the house of some things that T really likes and start to control access to them. Which sounds a bit mean, but we’ve got to give him a reason to want to communicate.