MANDS = 17

Today was a pretty good day with Tony. He was really excited about his new Blue’s Clues coloring sheets (in fact it was at sometimes difficult to get him to do other things than draw). We were tacting the items on his coloring sheets (i.e. “Who’s that, Tony?” …Tony’s response- “Blu Clues!”) and I removed one of the sheets to reveal “mail box” and Tony busted out with “MAIL BOX!” before I could even give him the prompt. He did great with independently tacting “crayon” and consistently manded for “open” everytime he wanted to use the markers. Because Tony was so excited about the coloring pages that we ended up working on shapes and colors while we were drawing. I had Tony choosing which color of crayon he would like to see if he would mand for a certain color (he only manded for red, but later tacted green and orange). Tony also played a lot with the tunnel and requested “tickle” several times (which he hasn’t done in awhile). I couldn’t get to MTS before speech came in but we still worked on body parts (tacts and receptive drills) as well as some motor imitation. Tony also was making some approximations to clothing items from the dress-up game we played with (shirt and then echoing glasses).

On top of blogging about today, I wanted to ask a couple questions about the book. I know that we have been recording a separate list of prompted and unprompted tacts but I noticed that some of them are listed twice and then recorded as “yes” for prompted and unprompted on the same day. So my question is, are these 2 “yeses” recorded as two independent events where one was prompted and the other was unprompted? Sorry, I’ve just been getting confused. Today, I put a star next to the ones that Tony did prompted as well as unprompted.

My other question was about the body part receptive drills. My understanding is that we are only giving a “yes” to unprompted command (i.e. “Touch your….[body part tact here]”). Based on what I know of Tony’s abilities, I don’t think at this point he could do these drills unpromtped…this is why I have been putting “No” to these because with a visual prompt he can do the task, but without he probably couldn’t. Anyway, I thought I could use some input from Jay and Elizabeth with these matters. If you have time and want to post to the blog that would be good,..or we can just talk on Thursday. Thanks!