PECS

PECS is short for picture exchange communication system. I am NOT an expert on this or anything but it works well for us. 

Basically last year our speech therapist suggested it to us (then she left to have a baby and her replacement knew nothing of this program, but now we have an excellent therapist again who helps) Anyhoo. 

We took her advice and looked it up online (googling pecs gave us a lot of bodybuilders). We checked out demos on utube and then contacted the makers/trainers etc to find out about any training. It was like almost $500 for a 2 day training (which was in the Spring, and I had no more sick time left from surgeries, so I actually lost pay, too) But I contacted them and explained my situation and they allowed me to "work" the conference and register people in exchange for attending free.  How awesome! 

Because both me and Phil couldn't attend together, I went on day one. Came home and trained him. He went on day 2 and came home and taught me.

This program allows Adam (and others with communication issues) to "talk". It is a book and all kinds of pictures with velcro on the back. Adam goes over to the book, will find the picture of what he wants and hand it to me. There are systematic teaching steps involved and in the beginning we needed toys and things that he REALLY wanted. It also took two people to teach him this because someone has to be like invisable and guide him to the book and appropriate picture of the object he wants you to give him.

This summer especially he really got it. Like at first there were only a few pictures he knew and was kind of confused, like it was a game we were playing. All of a sudden, he turned 2 and the switch turned on. Now he walks over to the book all by himself (NO PROMPTING), will flip through 20 or more photos, find a picture of a train for example, take it off the book and stick it on a velco sentence strip. He will then detach the sentence strip and walk over (even into another room) and hand the sentence strip to a person. The strip might say I want trains. He gets so excited when we read the strip aloud to him and then play what he is asking us to play.

He now asks us for food (that is away in cabinets), toys, to go outside. 

One of the pictures has music notes and says music. At first we taught him this with actual music on a cd player. Then he would give e this card when we were out and there wasn't any cd music around so I would launch into some sort of kids song. He found this amusing and then would hand me this music card while I was making dinner- like the boss he is demanding I sing a song for him.  Sometimes I would not sing the right song. So then I blew up some photos from PECS that were songlike and created a larger laminated "song board". Now he will point to the song that he wants to sing. 

I really need to destroy Bingo.