Quinn's still sick. Cooper's still Cooper.

Not much else going on right now. I am just trying to figure out next year for the kids. Sounds like the Explorer classroom at Shafer Center might be really good for Cooper but we can't afford that and ABA. Decisions, decisions. It will probably be taught by Jaime who he loves so that would be great too!

The class runs four days a week, for three hours each day. The class is co-treated by a speech-language pathologist and special educator. The focus of the class is to promote basic language and preacademic skills such as:

1) expressive language skills such as requesting and commenting (with increasingly longer lengths of utterances as well as variety of utterances, e.g., "I want cookie" "May I have a cookie?", "Can I have the cookie?")
2) receptive language skills such as following 1 and 2 step-directions, identifying common items and vocabulary learned in the units (e.g., "firefighter" for the community helpers unit, "snow" for the winter unit), responding to his name, attending during group activities.
3) pragmatic Language skills such as greeting peers, referencing peers, joint attention, joint references, emerging symbolic play skills (e.g., pretending a block is a hat), and parallel play skills.
4) learning classroom routines such as independently transitioning between tasks, attending during group instruction, completing classroon tasks such as art projects, and responding in a group (rather than 1:1).
5) pre academic skills such as developing matching, imitation, color identification, number id, letter id, and sorting skills.

I was told today they would be putting him in the next class up if he would only talk. At least they know how darn smart he is there.

Also, Quinn is doing great with the PECS. He has pretty much mastered putting the PEC into my hand in just this one week. He repeatedly requested hot dogs tonight by placing the PEC into my open hand. Cooper did it too, but I need to get another hot dog card. It is way less annoying when he asks that way instead of banging on the table like he usually does!