I want orange gummy bears, please.

I have made previous posts about my "most challenging student" who I have really come to love. I am so incredibly proud of the great strides she has made in the past few months. This is the student who moved here from Kenya and has never been in school before this past Summer. She is toilet trained now (Thank God) and better yet, she is "using her words." We have given her a tool to communicate and man, is this kid flying!

If you are not familiar with the Picture Exchange Communication System, you can read about it here. Basically, there is a systematic approach to introducing the non-verbal or limited-verbal child to pictures that they can use to communicate. They are expected to communicate using pictures, as any other child would be expected to communicate using their voice. The idea is that there is still an "exchange" of communication. The kids are expected to "tap" their communication partner's shoulder to get their attention, at which point the person will turn and say, "Yes, Johnny?" This allows the children to participate in almost everything, in the same way that their peers do! Some kids take YEARS to acquire the entire PECS sequence (There are six phases, with the final one ending on "spontaneous comments" such as, "I see a blue ball" instead of just requests).

My student has absolutely made tremendous progress in only five months. We are on Phase IV with her and continue to be amazed on a daily basis.

On Monday, we introduced Phase IV "with attributes" - meaning adjectives are now required. This is a tricky phase to teach, but there are always things you can look out for that can turn into teachable moments. The reason I knew she was ready for attributes was because I was noticing that every time she asks for Gummy Bears - if we give her a red one, she will push it away because she doesn't want red. She really loves the orange ones, but will eat any color except red. This phase starts out by having the child request something, "I want gummy bears." Then, you respond by saying, "Oh, you want gummy bears? Which one?" and the child will reach for a bear (usually they reach for one that you know they want - in our case, it was orange.) After they reach, you don't allow them to grab the gummy bear, but you show them to add the "orange" icon to their sentence strip, so that the strip now says, "I want ORANGE gummy bears." They "read" (tap) the icons to you - and you deliver the goods.

As soon as she figured out how to ask for Orange gummy bears, it was all downhill from there! The look in her eyes when she discovered she could specifically request the beloved ORANGE gummy bear.... it was priceless.

Today, she amazed us even further. It is imperative that "explicit" teaching happens for each of these phases of PECS - and it is imperative to work on generalizing the skills into other areas - by showing them they can use the colors to ask for other items, as well. Well, we had not even made it past the gummy bear lesson when we were sitting at the group table today. The kids were all drawing (this will be my next post). My student had a paper in front of her but no markers. She grabbed her PECS book and pulled off, "I want black" and then leaned over and grabbed the black marker. Incredible! We didn't have a marker PECS card, but we had the colors. We didn't teach her to ask for colored markers, but she did it! She generalized!

We can only hope that her vocabulary continues to explode each and every day.

It's awesome to know that when she wants an orange gummy bear, she can tell us.

Here is a video of her asking for orange gummy bears. I had to do just her hands for confidentiality reasons.