This marks week 10 of Jonah’s ABA therapy.

This week we worked on naming body parts, imitating action words, matching, and reviewed colors, numbers, letters and shapes! The biggest breakthrough this week was Jonah figuring out the word “space” and using that as a request instead of screaming when he wants more room.

We have finally established a bit of a routine, which is helping immensely with Jonah’s progress.

Jonah will initially be in the playroom playing with his toys. Our therapist will come down and join him and do some “momentum building” exercises (things he has already mastered) with him, but at the end, add something new.

We have been trying to think of words to teach Jonah when he needs a break from everything because as it was, he would just start screaming and throwing things when he was ‘done.’

So, in this case, he asks Jonah if he needs “space.” Jonah will repeat “space.” And our therapist will then let Jonah go back to playing and he would go back to the dining room.

After a few days of this, Jonah quickly caught on to what the word “space” means.

When he would start getting agitated about the work, our therapist would then simply ask him, “Do you need space?” And Jonah would repeat it amidst the non-verbal protesting, and our therapist would honor the request.

By the end of the week, Jonah didn’t need any prompting to request “space” and it cut out almost all of the non-verbal protesting. He just simply said “space” when he was “done.”

We are trying to reinforce that spoken tool so by the end of much of the later sessions, our therapist would just be walking into the room, and walking back out when Jonah asked for “space.”

We will progress from there.