Activity Schedules can be a whole lot more than just a few timed leisure activities! We can use activity schedules comprised of a variety of leisure, academic, self-care, daily living, and vocational tasks at home, at school, and at work for our learners with autism of all ages and abilities. Programming through activity schedules can be a great way to facilitate independence, productivity, and for some of our learners, to even decrease and manage interfering behaviors.

Join us to learn more about how to set up, teach, and maintain an activity schedules and independent tasks for your child or your client as well as for some strategies to think creatively, promote independence and generalization, and to get started making the most of activity schedules with your learners!

This workshop will facilitate attendees to:

• Read their student’s psychological evaluations with greater understanding.

• Consider what proactive supports can be put in place immediately for that child based on those findings.

• Utilize the evaluation to prepare that student’s IEP goals and decide what IEP goals may need to be updated/adjusted to address their needs.

Participants are encouraged to bring old or new psychological evaluations and IEP goals for their child or students (HIPAA compliant, NO personal identifying information shared or displayed) in order to workshop with the group about what can be done to support present or future students.

Being an effective communicator is critical to the success of our learners with autism. Communication can take the form of vocal language, sign language or the use of a communication device. Approximately, 25%-35% of children with autism are considered ‘minimally vocal.’ While some ambiguity may exist regarding the definition of ‘minimally vocal’, we know that there are strategies that can be employed to shape vocal language over time. Mr. Cepeda will present some of the vocal imitation strategies, that he has used over the last 25 years to teach young children who were considered “non-vocal” to be primarily vocal language communicators, and to teach vocal children to develop longer utterances as they acquired the skills needed for conversation-based programming.

There are a few programs that our learners must master and generalize to have a solid foundation for conversational language. The three programs in this presentation are critical programs for our learners to acquire as they form the base of our conversations. There are basic and advanced components to these programs, and it is vital that we know how to teach, troubleshoot, refine, and facilitate generalized responding.

Prepositions, Pronouns and Opposites are a few of the most challenging language concepts to teach to our learners. Why? …because these concepts are abstract and not concrete. Therefore, teaching these qualities can be tricky for instructors. We must be systematic, creative, and have multiple teaching procedures that can be used to facilitate the acquisition and use of these concepts into the learner’s everyday language repertoire. Then, once these concepts are mastered, how do we expand on them? We will discuss a few different ways to expand these concepts, especially prepositions. When implemented systematically, Prepositions can be an excellent starting point for complex instructions, and an excellent concept for our learners to combine and generalize previously acquired skills.

This workshop will facilitate attendees to:

1. Identify the prerequisite skills for Negation/Exclusions, Past Tense Verbs, Describing and Guessing.

2. Identify the sequence of programs to teach as well as supporting programs.

3. Identify effective teaching and data collection procedures for the skills discussed.

4. Conduct probes for generalized responding.

This workshop will help facilitate attendees to:

1. Conduct a needs assessment for communication among team members within a school district.

2. Identify all team members and levels of communication required per case.

3. Identify stagnating problems within teams leading to more effective treatment for clients.

4. Identify deficits, create collaboration goals and monitor progress.

5. Implement a collaborative model, monitor progress and adjust according based on data.