small breakthrough with tacting drill

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

I haven't posted in a long time because we have been pretty discouraged

with 's continuing inability to learn new tacts. However, I recently

hit on something that I wanted to share in case it might trigger an idea

for someone else. loves to match things, he always has. But we have

never been able to figure out how to use this interest in working at the

table with him. In a move of desperation, I made up word cards for each of

his tacts and the target tacts that we were working on. What we do is lay

out 4 mastered tacts with a target tact and then bounce back and forth

between them in working on the target, prompting the target tact and having

him tact the mastered ones. Now what we do is to put out the five word

cards, then give him each picture card so that he matches it with the word

card...we prompt this with a finger point if needed. This has accomplished

two things: the first is that he is much more interested in the drill and

so is paying attention to the cards much better than before. The second

is that he is learning the tacts at a much faster pace.........he learns a

new one in 3-4 days, sometimes quicker, compared to it taking him weeks or

months to learn a new one. There are a couple of other changes we made in

our work on tacts as well. We now only work on one tact at a time, until

it is mastered. Before we had been in the habit of working on 2-5 tacts at

a time. I am convinced this was just too difficult for . The other

thing is that during the drills, we are lowering the response effort by

telling him the names of the some of the mastered tacts so that he can

concentrate all his effort on the target. The combination of these things

has made a very positive difference in him learning tacts. We have been

doing this for about 6 weeks and he has learned ten new tacts in that

time. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this trend continues.

Lynda