July 27th, 2010

Kat came to see Carver again today. We just love our visits from Kat. She's just full of knowledge and new things to try.

During her last visit, she asked us to place Carver's spoon on the tray of his high chair (making noise when placing it), then we were told to ask Carver to "get his spoon". Once he picks up the spoon, we use hand-over-hand to help him pretend eat. We pretend to scoop up food with the spoon and then bring the spoon to his mouth. We've been doing this at every meal for the past 3 weeks. Now, he picks up the spoon when asked and will even automatically bring the spoon to his mouth most of the time. We've also started having him touch his bottle of milk before giving him a drink. We always tell him what he is touching before giving him a drink.

For this visit, we got to show off Carver's "cause and effect" abilities. Carver has a hammer that lights up when you bang it on something. Carver likes to bang the hammer and then bring the lighted end up to his eye to see the light. He knows when the light goes out that he needs to bang the hammer again. He'll do this several times before getting bored with the toy. We also got to show off Carver's ability to "roll with purpose". We got out Carver's Mozart music cube and showed Kat how Carver works to get the cube in a position where he can press the buttons to see the lights and listen to the music. Kat's always excited to see Carver's accomplishments. Once we were done showing off, Kat gave us something new to work on....

1.) Present the target vocalization every five seconds during a 1-minute time period.

2.) Introduce 5 times a day

3.) Initially, emphasize the following (target vocalizations):

/i/ as in eat

/a/ as in father

/u/ as in you

/ae/ as in at

4.) As Carver begins to imitate and spontaneously produce a variety of vowels, canonical syllables can be highlighted. Model salient consonants /b/, /p/, /m/, and /w/

The hope is that by "flooding" Carver with these sounds, he will eventually start to imitate these sounds. So, we're off and running. We're going to give it a try.