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Services We Offer

Services We Offer

Discrete Trial Training (DTT) is a highly-structured, one-on-one teaching approach used as part ABA therapies. It involves breaking simple skills down to their most basic parts and teaching those skills to the child, in a step-by-step process. DTT is used to teach a variety of new skills or behavior to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, ranging from very simple to more complex skills, depending on the specific needs of the child.

Errorless learning is a strategy to ensure independence in your child and foster success by systematically fading out assistance. Errorless learning is the technique of making sure the child provides the right answer to a question every time, reducing or eliminating mistakes.  A key element of errorless teaching is the therapist prompting the answer when the child appears uncertain; increasing the likelihood the child makes the correct response. Prompts are extra cues or hints to help the child know what to do in a particular situation or time (including physical assistance, pointing, demonstrating, showing a picture, writing a checklist, or asking what the child wants).  In addition to prompts, errorless learning uses positive reinforcement to assure the skill is performed again.

Functional Communication Training is used to teach and establish replacement behaviors for inappropriate or harmful behaviors such as aggression, escape/elopement, non-compliance, etc. When a child is regularly engaging in disruptive, challenging behaviors the child is having difficulty communicating or meeting their wants and needs. Even for a verbal child, but particularly for a non-verbal child, behavior is a way of communicating. It is our role to develop a comprehensive ABA program to replace challenging behaviors with more effective and efficient positive/functional behaviors in order to get their needs and wants meet in a more socially acceptable manner.

Fine and gross motor skills are an important milestone while learning to participate in many activities in life. We use our motor skills every day to help us physically navigate the world around us. We teach fine and gross motor skills in small steps and practice them on a daily basis. Your child will be able to practice and learn these skills more quickly and take steps towards generalizing their skills outside of therapy. We help each child become more independent in a variety of aspects of life.

 *Fine Motor Skills are a child’s ability to make movements using the small muscles in their hands, wrists, fingers and feet.

 

*Gross Motor Skills are a child’s ability to involve the larger muscles in their body such as their arms, legs and torso.

 

Examples include:

  • Learning to hold a spoon or fork and eat independently
  • Pinch small objects with thumb and pointer finger
  • Learning to write, draw, use scissors, etc
  • Holding objects, or transfer objects between hands
  • Walking, running, jumping, and other movement based activities

Natural Environment Training, or NET, utilizes the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis to teach children in the natural environment. Natural environment teaching helps child to acquire new skills effectively. Natural Environment Training focuses on a child’s specific needs and embeds them within his/her interests. We provide NET to teach children basic functional communication skills to advance language skills and a wide variety of social  skills.

Parent training empowers caregivers to be able to address challenging situations and teach new skills to their children. The parent training commitment is based on the family’s schedule and availability, and parent input is used to develop goals that will have the greatest impact on the family’s overall quality of life.

Pivotal Response Treatment is an approach that targets your child’s pivotal areas of development, including motivation, social initiations, self-management, and responding to multiple language cues. PRT relies heavily on the motivation of the child to guide the activities of the session and uses natural reinforcement (e.g. if a child is reaching for a toy car, the therapist will prompt the child to say “car”, before handing over the car to the child). A well-run PRT session will make it appear like the child is playing.

Whether it’s brushing teeth, getting dressed, transitioning between settings or participating in family routines, we cover it all. Our goal is to help your child become as independent as possible. We also specialize in toilet training, feeding programs and sleeping programs. When we teach our clients self-help skills, we ensure that these skills are learned not just with our therapists, but that they are generalized with parents and family members.

Building social skills is a primary focus of our program, and a building block for success in many other areas of development. Every piece of our program interacts to create a comprehensive plan for your child, and social interaction is a key component in linking the entire program. One of the most important steps in the process is learning to make consistent eye contact; helping your child understand where to look to get the input that they need to be successful.

Beginning with eye contact, we break social skills down into small increments and lead each child on their way to engaging in interactive play, reciprocal conversation, responding to initiations from others and initiating play and conversation independently.

Verbal Behavior (VB) is used to assess and facilitate the development of language skills. We believe the ability to communicate, through vocal or augmentative communication, is one of the most important life skills to be taught and is the emphasis of all of our programs. We use tools such as the VB-MAPP (Sundberg) that helps to identify specific language objectives, and give us the means to create a personalized curriculum for your child.