Mands: 36

Whoa! That sounds like a lot of mands, but the activities we were engaging in required frequent manding. We were painting; he manded to have me lift him up, then higher, then each time he was done with one color and each time he was ready for a new one. When we first walked outside he wanted to play in the bus, and there he used such mands as ‘want up,’ ‘open door,’ ‘close door,’ and ‘want down’ repeatedly. Then when we finally got to the grass it was ‘gooooooooooooooo!’ Luckily I felt like running today.

As they sometimes do, our first walk ended by Tony manding for turtle/cup. I had him say “where?,” and than told him they were back at the house. We walked back home to see them. By the time we found them, Jill was here.

After speech we went back into his room and played. While we played we also did some ABA. We tried some form/ feature/ function receptives and built things with giant legos. At one point I took some blocks out of his hand to help him focus on a question and he reacted in a way I’ve never seen from him: he swatted the blocks right out of my hand! It looked like he wanted to scream or cry and I knew it was time to move on. I just played with him and the legos for a while until I knew he was calm and happy and then we went over intraverbals. He did really well with these, the only ones he didn’t get were you smell with your ‘nose,’ and an elephant is a big ‘animal.’ He said ‘trunk.’ An elephant has a long ‘trunk’ is a phase II intraverbal, so it must be a little confusing. I had to ask him twice before he gave an approximation of his name for the your name is ‘Tony,’ but all six others he got on the first try!

The preposition and adjective tacts are not going very well. Unless it is a light switch it is hard to get a correct on/ off answer from him. When we are cleaning something up, say crayons, he knows we are putting them ‘in’ the box, but then if I ask if the brown crayon is in or out of the box and it is in, he usually answers incorrectly. He used to get this right alot, but I don’t know exactly what’s going on here. Maybe he’s just tired of these questions which have been in the program for a long time. He is even less interested in the adjectives. He either doesn’t answer at all or answers wrong. Maybe he doesn’t care whether something is long or short or big or little. Maybe we should take these out of the program for a month and then come back.