Well since ARD in October of last year for his 11th grade year (he sits in all the ARD meetings now and he absorbs everything we say), we’ve been having some off and on behavior issues, many not seen since elementary school. His teachers and I have been deciphering everything to see if we could place our fingers on it and nothing has happened. See in the 11th grade Tyler is going to be doing vocation training for a little while off campus (right now it’s classroom vocation training) and we had discussed starting the off campus in January instead of waiting until the new school year. Well all of the sudden his speech therapist and I were talking because she was concerned about him being “off track” in one of the sessions and she said he kept mentioning that he kept saying “no school jobs” – so it went off like a light bulb to me. I contacted his teachers by email when I got home (didn’t want to risk Tyler over hearing this conversation) and I told her what transpired at speech and to let’s back off on using the word “jobs” and let’s create a social story about going off campus and let’s reach out to the parents of the students going off campus to see if the vocation teacher can briefly record them to show Tyler what they are doing – we THINK his anxiety is over the top on the unknown of the vocation off campus. Since we’ve taken this different approach Tyler has actually had numerous good days again (to be truthful he had been restrained 4x since October and mostly to keep him from the fright or flight action – but the word restraint always puts me into high gear into thinking and figuring something out). I like to be honest with people because this is real. Tyler has improved so much it’s unreal but the reality is that behaviors can still happen and we are working through them – still so far with no medication (the always on my mind goal – is to stay medication free), so for now – behaviors have calmed we are taking a different approach because we all feel confident that the “jobs” was the trigger. His speech therapist (we do speech therapy outside of school) is also willing to help us with this when I get the social story to her, relating to people’s emotions and actions and his emotions and responses and how to verbalize with effective communication speech.
So the teachers, therapist and myself hope we are back on the right track to help Tyler achieve all the accomplishments he’s capable of achieving. Because we all know that behavior is a strong form of communication, it’s just trying to figure it out and sometimes we can and sometimes we can’t. It looks like this time we did.
As difficult as it’s been, it is also a positive thing that his comprehension and understanding skills are improving – because he heard us discussing this during ARD and for Tyler – EVERYTHING is a no before it’s yes, meaning he doesn’t like change, want to try new things, etc.
#oilyspectrum #beingadetective #vocationtraining #jobskills #anxiety #socialstories #videosoffriends #comprehensionandunderstandingimprovement
Autism Plus More 