Ming from Agents of Speech coached a mother through free online courses to help her autistic child learn to speak in sentences, never meeting him in person. The approach started with learning-to-learn skills like sitting and following commands, moved through gestures and word imitation, then built to two-word phrases through play routines before reaching full sentences.
In this video I'll talk about how I got this child to speak in sentences. Now I'm, I'm not in the liberty to show you a lot of videos and I'm not going to show you the case study videos here where we're separately making some case study videos. I mean there's quite a lot, there's like a dozen or more progress videos that we're meaning to release. But I'm going to talk you through how I did it without meeting him. The first thing is online courses. So the parents who got the most results from us learn from our online courses that are free or low cost. Now they're all free. So you can just go to wwagents of speech.com course learn there. This particular child, he lives in the usa. His mother moved from Philippines to USA for work and during that time she learned from our online course. And I never met this child just because I live in Asia, he lives in the us it's pretty much impossible to have, you know, like meeting. So we didn't even do any type of zoom consultations with the child there because that'd be really difficult cuz he had mild to moderate autism spectrum disorder. So putting him on a video call, he just run off. So online courses just to get all the bases covered and I don't have to talk over and over again on the consultations repeating the same stuff. So she took her own time. She learned that, right? And then when she was ready, she asked for help, right? She was like, so what do I do? Back in the day when our parent coaching wasn't as well established, we would have zoom calls. We don't have this anymore by the way. We would have parents come on zoom calls as a group and we would teach like some basic speech therapy techniques that they can do. So I decided to teach this mother the basic skills, right? Set the child down, get stuff that the child wants and then go from there, right? At least get the child to sit down. We focus on the basic stuff and then something what we call learning to learn skills. We got to get a child learning to learn skills up to par first. That means can they sit down? Can I take commands? Are they snatching? If they are, then we have to teach that. It's just those basic skills that got to a point where, okay, now we can start injecting language goals into it. So then we taught one skill at a time. In the beginning we start with just an open palm gesture meaning the child wants to receive instead of grabbing. We have it well documented in the free courses. So go to agents of speech.com course. All right. And then we progressed into verbal imitation. We got that done. And once we got that done, we start to teach phrases. So we realized that this particular kid, he had a lot of phrases coming out from, you know, YouTube videos and so on, and he could sing really well. But then when you got to a point where you're trying to teach him sentences, he would miss out words, he would miss out sounds. So what did we do? We needed to make sure that he could do multi syllabic words first. So then we decided to clap out the syllables or show fingers to how many syllables there are. Then he wasn't skipping syllables. He was done at single word level in terms of imitation, right? So then we needed to move on to a place where we didn't need to say the word and the child will still say it back. So kind of like, what's this? Or like what's happening? Or we just wait and the child would just say it on his own. That's what we call a spontaneous level. So when we got to a spontaneous level of which he was using single words, we could go into the phrases. So we taught these skills one at a time. When we got to the phrases, we realized that he was no longer skipping the syllables, but he was still skipping the words. The reason was because to him, using one word was as efficient as using two words. So he didn't bother, right? He would only copy the phrases and sentences that he found amusing. But it wasn't amusing to use two words to do the same. It wasn't efficient to him. It wasn't entertaining at all. So what we did was we didn't focus on teaching the two words. We decided to go into the play skill route and teach him to play a play sequence until he understood off from like, you know, you could cut something, wash something, and then dry it and eat it or whatever, or cook it and eat it. And you can just search inside of this YouTube channel for like play sequences. I've done some demos before, but we have more inside of our free courses again. Agentsofspeech.com course. Anyways, so once the child understood the play sequence, then it was the time to reintroduce the two word phrases. Because now every time he wants to do something, the two word, what we chose was a verb and an object that it made sense for him to say the correct words, right? So if he said cut, caret. If he just said carrot or just cut, we do something that silly. So for Instance cut. Then we'll try to cut something else that's not cuttable. If he says cut. If he just says carrot, then we do something else with the carrot. So then he must say cut carrot to do the cutting of a carrot. Okay, fast forward. We kept on doing the play skills. We kept on adding things into the phrases to make the play more meaningful. We got to sentences. And how this all happened was through feedback and troubleshooting. Right? So I can tell you all these and you can watch and see all the activities, all the cars, all the pictures, all the toys and tools that we used. But when you do it, you're going to hit the brick wall for sure. You're going to be like, hey, this doesn't work. What the heck? Why did I listen to this guy talking about speech therapy online? So what you needed was feedback and to know the nuances of therapy. And recently there was a bunch of posters inside of our parents community. One of them said what really helped during that time. And actually I got the same feedback from this particular mother. She was like, I really needed to know why it wasn't working right. She forgot to give feedback and in some particular instances, she put the plate, the tools within the reach of the kid. So he didn't need to talk, he didn't need the parent there. Right. And the last thing that she said was like, it wasn't fun and it was getting boring and it was becoming like a task to the child and he didn't want to do it anymore. So then we were troubleshooting it and to see what where his interests lie. And we use that interest to help him build play routines that we can lean on to teach language. All right, so that's how we got there. And obviously we will have not obvious, but we will have case study videos coming up very soon. As of recording of this video, we're going through and siphoning all the videos and we will give you some interviews and some case studies of the parents we've taught and the children their results. Okay? So if you don't want to miss any of that, you can go to www.agentsofspeech.com course those courses go from zero words all the way up to sentence building and even more like verbal reasoning, behavioral management. And inside there there's also a community of parents and we will announce there first when we do get the interviews and the case studies done. Okay, that's also free by the way. That's all for now. Wish you a good week ahead and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.
