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February,
2008
Parent Tip of the Month by
Kendra Severs,
MA
CCC-SLP
Incidental Teaching: Merging
your ABA
program into everyday routines
As with many children on the
spectrum, my son has had a lot of difficulty
generalizing what he learns into other settings.
After starting
ABA
at the Brent Woodall Foundation and in the home I
realized that I needed to make the programs part of
his daily routines in order for him to learn more
efficiently. I took a look at the programs he had
and looked at my routines in the home and started
pairing certain programs with
compatible activities. I began to notice that my
son was learning his programs faster than in the
past and that he generalized the programs much
sooner.
I found it helpful to make a list of all of his
programs and post them on my refrigerator along with
the routines I needed to pair them with.
Sometimes I could work on several programs within
one routine. For example, at breakfast, I
would work on 'I Want ____" to choose what he
wanted for breakfast, I would ask him what
size fork, spoon, cup, plate and bowl he wanted as
we were working on big/little, I would ask him what
color cup and straw he wanted as we were working on
colors, we worked on in and out as we used a small
pitcher to pour juice into his cup, I worked on
full/empty as he began and finished his meal, and I
used a special placemat with different animals on
it to work on labeling animals and identifying
animal sounds as he ate.
I
had a checklist on my refrigerator as well where I
could tally which programs we did during the day and
his responses.
As
he started new programs I would add them into the
routines while still periodically working on the
older programs.
While writing all of this down
was more work to begin with it actually became much
easier over time as ABA
became
as much of
a routine in my household as everything else. Over
time you become more adept and creative about how to
work on programs without it seeming like work at
all. It is harder to take the data at times
because you don’t want to stop what you are doing to
write it down. I found that it helped at times
to even put a strip of scotch tape on my leg to
check responses as I went without having to find a
piece of paper. I also worked on his programs
while out at the park, the grocery store, and the
library.
Incidental teaching has been the tool to change my
son's perceptions of the world around him. The more
we worked on his programs, the more he generalized
and the more he understood the world around him. We
still have much to work on but I feel that through
constantly working on things small steps can become
larger gains. As many of us already intuitively
work on many of our children's
programs during the day it is only a small step to
merge them into our daily routine.
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