getting results-progress with Autism ASD Aspergers intellectual disabilities pg8

Lately we have been concentrating on OT (Occupational Therapy) and Speech Therapy for Isa. We have been taking Isa to professionals for the therapy sessions as well as getting Uni Students to work with her at home, expanding and building on what she does at the sessions. It works both ways as the students are able to get hands on experience in their chosen field and Isa gets the benefit of expanding on the professional therapy.
Again Liz has been incredibly tireless at finding and making resources, this truly is one of her strengths (check out her new web site isybee.com.au). Liz also trains the therapists and prepares the programs for them to work through.
Another great achievement for Isa in 2008 has been the Premier’s Reading Challenge organized through the SA Government and her school. This year she managed to read through 126 books to gain a bronze medal award. Last year she received an award for reading 106 books.
Isa’s reading has progressed extremely well over the years and she can spell and read extremely well. Some of the early strategies we used to get her reading to this stage was to make up phonetic picture/word cards using PowerPoint presentations that would spell the word out letter by letter while displaying a picture of the object, Isa could step through the cards using the arrow keys or mouse on the computer. She absolutely loved it and thrashed it. Another method we used later on was Karaoke. We noticed that Isa liked songs and would try to mimic the words, unfortunately we did not know the words of even some of the simplest children's songs so I would download the lyrics from the web. Isa would read the words and then sing them along with the songs. It's then that it hit me to try Karaoke, I found a computer based program which is like an mp3 player but has a display which shows the words 2 or 3 lines at a time highlighting the word to be sung in time with the music - here is a link to the player http://audio4you.org/. The player uses midi and kar files which have the lyrics embedded in them, there are many free sites to download the music files on the web. At first we started with simple children's songs then we progressed as her music taste progressed to songs such as ABBA and Boney M songs and Barbie Girl etc. We have found that she really enjoys the Karaoke and she is learning to read at the same time.

What we need to concentrate on now is her conversation and social interaction skills. This is definitely a challenge and we are always looking for ways to do this. One methods we have been using for a number of years is the bedtime interactive stories using her favorite characters such as TeleTubbies, Bananas in Pyjamas and Spot etc. We make up short stories where they are doing things she enjoys such as sliding down slides etc. we tell part of the story and she tells other parts asking and answering questions as we go along. This along with the Speech therapy and interacting with other therapists such as her OT, and with other children, are starting to make an impact.