Children's Learning Connection - Orange County, CA

When do you introduce a social setting to the child’s program?

Many times a parent will seek to place their child in a social setting, such as preschool, early on in treatment because this is what looks the most typical to them. In some cases, this is a mistake because the child does not yet possess the necessary skills to be truly successful in that environment.

Often, 1:1 services need to continue for a period of time, in order for the child to learn necessary language and cognitive skills that he or she will need to be successful in a social environment. In order for a child to be truly successful in a typical school setting, he must master these “learning to learn” language and cognitive skills before moving onto learning in a group environment. Some children appear ready to learn in a group environment because they can learn impressive pre-academic skills in a rote fashion, but the time must be taken to teach children truly how to learn from their environment.

CLC programs are designed to teach children the language and cognitive strategies used by typical children to learn from their environment. The following are some early developing language learning strategies that should be mastered before entry into a group or social setting to ensure success:

• Localizing to different sounds
• Joint Referencing (foundational)
• Visual and Auditory Attending Skills
• Imitation (Nonverbal) · Imitation (Verbal)
• Visual Matching (as it relates to vocabulary development)
• Auditory Word Discrimination/ Initial Vocabulary strategies
• Visual Memory (Visual memory, or visual recall, is necessary to talk about objects, events or people that are not present).
• Auditory Memory (Auditory memory, or auditory recall, is necessary to talk about objects, events or people that are not present.)
• Gestalt Chunking (helpful in the social setting so the child is able to use phrases that will get his needs met)
• Observational Learning (critical–this is the child’s ability to learn new information through observing others)
• Understanding others’ communicative intent (very important)

The progression above shows how the team’s goals in the beginning of therapy are to get your child to attend to the environment around him (localizing to sounds), then to reference objects, people and actions that are taking place around him, then onto observational learning and understanding others’ communicative intent. The relationships that he develops with people and objects in the 1:1 treatment setting will prepare him for treatment in the social setting. Without these skills the child will not be an active participant in the social setting.

Many programs wait until much later in their program development to advanced learning skills like observational learning. Research on normal development shows these skills start to develop from infancy. That is why CLC starts working on these skills as soon as the child’s attending skills have increased to a point where more advanced skills are able to be taught.

Your child’s interdisciplinary team will focus on developing the above stated skills in order for your child to not only be enrolled in a social setting, but be successful!!!