Last evening, Andrea, Jared's home therapy consultant and a certified behavioral analyst, discovered that he knows the phonetic sounds for the letter names for most of the alphabet. What I mean is that, in response to "A says ___," he says "ah," and so forth. This is called an "intraverbal" in the science of verbal behavior. But enough techincal stuff! When they demonstrated it for me, I literally was moved to tears.
I am so excited because this moves him a lot closer to reading!!!! He's been working on connecting the letter symbols to their names and phonetic sounds, but this was a surprise -- completely unexpected. Over the years that we've been dealing with autism, I have heard of lots of other kids/families experiencing "wow" moments, but this is our first. Guess having all those noisy, phonetic-singing, toys around has really paid off. He stims on them.*
A huge shout out to all of Jared's wonderful therpists/teachers!!! We can't thank you enough!
* Stimming is short for engaging in self-stimulatory behavior. Many kids with autism have some weird-looking, repetitive behavior(s) they engage in to calm or soothe themselves. One of Jared's is pushing the buttons on the phonetic musical toys to repeat short phrases over and over. His dad says he's like a DJ mixing music.
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