Over the last 2 weeks a group of upper elementary girls and I have enjoyed an app named Cookie Next Door-Rainy Days. This app is essentially an animated cartoon to which students provide the narrative using their voices. Cookie is a little guy who takes to the ocean on his boat and encounters an adventure with other characters including a huge ...

Valentine's Day is the perfect time to review social skills and talk about friendship. A favorite curriculum for the younger children we serve is ''Good Talking Words'' by Lucy Hart Paulson and Rick van Den Pol. I love how this curriculum picks some simple key social concepts, and uses children's books to illustrate them. The ...

After a busy couple of weeks readjusting to the school routine and working on winter and penguins with my students, I've been trying some new apps on my iPad. I stumbled upon ''Where's My Water'' through my children and have become quite addicted! I have been able to integrate it into therapy and make it apply to language goals and ...

Who knows bullying better than those who are bullied? The last two week's blogs for Autism Spectrum Disorders, ''Bullying in ASD'' and ''The Vocabulary of Bullying'' have dealt with an overview of bullying and the words that people with ASD need to know that deal with bullying. Now, the words/vocabulary you need from one on the other end of ...

''Kathie, what's the number one strategy you use with children on the autism spectrum?'' I get asked that question a lot and I always reply with the same response. Any item I can hold in one hand comes up by my face.   That's so simple. But it's not so obvious.   That's so easy. But most people don't do it ...

In my blog on May 31, The Power of a Talking Stick, I gave you the solution if a child with autism or any language disorder is non-verbal or if they are a motor mouth. There were several comments about this blog so I felt it worth a re-visit and another ''Kathie strategy'' for the SLP bag of tricks. The Talking Card and Talking Stick are: FUN ...

The title of this Autism Spectrum blog, ''Categorization,'' reminds me of jargon from something one would study in engineering classes or architecture. Now add divergent and convergent and for sure we are building something.  In last week's blog ''Temple and Categorization,'' I emphasized how important categorizing is to children and adults ...

With only a month left to go in this school year, I thought I better get back to a blog I wrote way back at the beginning of the school year.  I had talked about four new approaches/therapy models/interventions that I'd be using this year — so far I've only blogged about two of them (Behavior Management Through Adventure and using the ...

Autism Awareness Month began on Sunday, April 1. My son Doug's birthday is April 1. The fifth annual World Autism Awareness Day was April 2. World Autism Awareness Day ''aims to increase people's awareness about people, especially children, with autism. The day often features educational events for teachers, health care workers and parents, as ...

When do you elicit a language sample? Certainly when you first see a child you would want to take a language sample. However, if the child is not comfortable on the initial assessment, there is nothing written in stone that says that it has to be completed the first time around. That in itself should tell you something. I feel that ...