Re: working on tacts

[Guest guest]

>So our first Sd is " What is it " , and we say the name of the tact and do the

>sign. We immediately follow this with a transfer, saying, " What is it? " ,

>but we don't say the tact name or do the sign. has a very strong

>echoic so I think this helps him to get it correct every time on the

transfer.

>We then move to a very strong tact or two, and then come back to the one we

>are working on and do the same procedure as above. We actually typically

>have 5 pictures on the table.....two target tacts and three very strong

>tacts and we bounce back and forth between the tacts, so that we hit each

>one two or three times during a sitting, and we will mix in some echoics or

>motor imitations or other intraverbals during this sitting to add variety

>and some easy stuff during that sitting.

Lynda,

Pretend I come from a different planet and bear with me. (Maybe I do!)

When you have your five photographs on the table, are you only

concentrating on tacting or intraverbals, or do you do RFFC at the same

time. Sometimes, I think we need to back off on this, which nobody seems to

want to do, since he is good at it, but he is also tired of it, and do more

" verbal " drills, if you will.

Isaac is echoing so much more now than I could have imagined last summer,

consistently. Somebody does a receptive ID, " Where is the moon? " (shape

card - review) and he looks at says, " Moon, " as he touches it. He is not

tacting something like that spontaneously and I don't expect him to, since

it's not that interesting or reinforcing, but his echoing is there whether

we ask or not a great deal of the time. The other day, and as I said, we

are doing a bit of review, just to be sure he's retained stuff, and to give

the new people a chance to learn the skill without new teaching at the the

same time, he said, " ek tan go " which was rectangle. The next day, he said,

" rek-tang-go " a bit clearer, and more accurate. We joked about this though,

like how functional a word is rectangle, and how often will he ask for it.

But for some reason, he decided he likes this shape, the word and being

asked about it. Beats me why.

Isaac likes things that are concrete and absolute, and I suppose shapes

meet the defintion of not a maybe thing.

But I am really writing to ask for an example of the tacting and how you

keep track. We want to really figure out how to be more consistent and use

more of a module apppoach. I feel like people, including me, have gotten

off track, kind of at the extreme end of things, and it is not helping us

teach new words, for mands or tacts by letting it happen as it happens.

Somethings work well with this approach, but clearly Ize needs way more

intensity for acquisition.

Now, intraverbals are also a lot easier for Isaac, even easier than mands,

because somehow hearing some of the sentence is a cue for him, and he can

find and say a word better than without any prompts. He is not manding as

much, and I am not sure what to do about it, because he waits for prompts.

It is hard to mand, if you are waiting for somebody to prompt, so you can

echo.

Do people running programs, continue to do manding programs as a big part

for some kids? He occasionally asks for something verbally, like this

morning, " Come with me, " and led me to the bathroom. He stood in front of

the toilet, and said, " Help, " paused and said, " go pee, " and looked at me.

I realized he needed help unbuttoning and zipping his jeans. So, I helped

and he was able to go pee. This was manding for assistance, versus food or

something, and ironically he is more likely to do that then ask for

something out of the blue. Maybe because he still is unable to really think

of what he wants without the item available, and the full bladder is the

" item " that allows him to mand for support. So, while this is not a tact

thing, it's why language is such an issue here. Isaac seems to be doing

better with tacting in some ways, but I know that manding technically

should be more reinforcing. However, I think for him, he likes KNOWING

something, so maybe that is part of the reinforcer. He labels BLUE and

GREEN spontaneously fairly often now, seeing the text or a color item, as a

tact, yet still does not tact that many nouns, or mand for as much as I

thought he would once his echoic got better. He comments which I find

amusing, " Good, " " I like it, " " Ummmm, " " Cold, " " Happy, " " Done, " and things

like that better than mands I think. Why, I do not know.

Ok, that is way off topic of this particular post, but puzzling out the

language teaching is always a bit confusing.

So, if you had an example of how you might teach five of those cards, could

you share like. If you were fairly certain, POPCORN and BAGEL would be

tacted at least on the second try, after hearing, " What is it? Popcorn, "

and then, " What is it? " and Isaac says, " Popcorn. " Most of the time, he

will do that with a handful of words now, which we are very excited about.

If we hold up the card and say " This is ______. " he generally says,

" Popcorn, " or " Is popcorn, " which is how he says, " It's. " And is pretty

good about saying it, if we change it and say, " You eat _____, " he'd

repeat, " Popcorn " more often than not.

We have very few still that I'd say are always consistent and clear every

single time, but without a doubt there has been massive improvement, even

if it is slow.

I'd like to know if people are literally teaching a handful, and how much

time would you estimate you spend tackling it per session, because I don't

think he gets enough practice on it. I think we went and swung to the other

side of the pendalum to avoid ten trials type thinking or mass trialing,

and we need to find some semblence of compromise.

Jennie