Autism-Articles

Children with autism are individuals, first and foremost. Each one of them comes to us with an array of cognitive abilities, learning styles, sensory irritants and impairments, need for routine, visual or auditory preferences, movement disturbances, varied and intense communication disturbances, and difficulties with social interactions. One or more commingling conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder, hyperactivity, opposition defiance disorder, psychosis, acute anxiety, post traumatic stress syndrome - the list goes on-may also exist. No one program will best meet the needs of all children. Intuition, flexibility and a willingness to use a variety of approaches will best insure progress of each individual child. A teacher or parent may choose to use a combination of incidental teaching, child-directed activities, and discrete trial format. Errorless teaching, prompting where necessary to keep the child from floundering keeps the child engaged and comfor...

According to recent statistics, autism is the fastest growing developmental disability in the U.S. today. Autism affects 1 in 110 children and 1 in 70 boys. About 40% of children with autism do not talk at all. Another 25%-30% of children with autism have some words at 12-18 months of age and then lose them. Others may speak, but not until later in childhood. (1) In 20 years there has been a 600% increase in the cases of autism. About a third to a half of those individuals will not develop enough natural speech to meet their daily communication needs. (2) Thanks to recent technology (iPad/iPod Touch) a groundbreaking and exciting therapeutic technique to teach non-verbal students to use spoken language has emerged. VAST Autism 1 - Core (app available from iTunes) combines best practices, video modeling, and literacy with auditory cues to provide unprecedented support for the development of vocabulary and word combinations. What this means is that students simply ...