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Early intervention

It is a system of coordinated services to support very young children who are identified with developmental delays or specific health conditions and their families. It helps early learners work towards meeting developmental milestones. It aims to develop personal strengths and different skills those are socially acceptable. An effective stimulation always enhances brain development. Therefore, it is always recommended to start an effective intervention as early as possible for those who are in need of special attention.

Age range for early intervention

Infants and toddlers are may qualify for help if they have developmental delays or specific health issues. Specifically, children between 0 – 3 years are falling under this group.

Why is parent training important for this?

Parents are the primary caregivers to their children. A child spends most of the time with his / her parents. Training parents helps a child to receive a systematic intervention throughout the day. It can bring a significant impact on a child’s ability to learn new skills.

We at New Dawn Centre provide both EI and Parent Training.

For more details please contact us.

Building Joint Attention

Imagine an infant is sitting in her mother’s lap facing each other and the mother is singing some common rhymes with different voice modulation, making silly faces, and tickling her with lots of affection. The child is looking at her mother and happily smiling. She might try to hum the tune that her mother is singing. Next, the mother is nodding her head sidewise and the child also tries to copy her action.

It is an expected and a regular scenario of building an infant’s attention in adult. Children start sharing attention in people, objects, and events in the first year itself. An ability to include adults in their play with toys and other objects is extremely important in a child’s development. Shared Attention or Joint Attention is the first step in learning to interact and communicate with others.

If a child finds it difficult engaging in Joint Attention (e.g. while playing together with toys, not looking at an adult and following his/her actions) by the end of his/her first year, then it is high time to start practicing some rigorous Joint Attention activities.

5 Simple Ideas for Joint Attention

1. We can take up the first idea from the previous example. You and your child sit facing each other, hum common and silly tunes or rhymes using very funny voice modulations and faces. Sing and pause. Tickle your child and start singing again. Repeat the sequence. Encourage her to touch you when you are taking a pause. When she touches you, come up with an exaggerating response.

2. Playing Peek-a-boo- it is a common and interesting game among children. You can either cover your eyes with your hands or use a colourful scarf that covers you face completely. Next, immediately remove your hands from your eyes or remove the scarf from your eyes and say, “peek -a-boo”. Tickle him and again repeat the sequence. Take a pause after couple of repetition. Cover your head and your face with the scarf and wait for your child’s response. If she pulls the scarf down, show an exaggerating response.

3. Blowing bubbles and popping them can be another interesting activity to build joint attention.

4. Take ragi/ rajma/ dal/rice or sand (the item that your child prefers) in a tray and take some colourful and shinning stones or a few favourite small toys of your child. Now, hum some funny tunes or songs, hide the stones or toys inside the grains or the sand in front of her. You can say, “let’s hide it”. Take a pause. Look at her and say, “1….,2…….,3…….and…here they are…. Yeah!!” Exaggerate your expressions when she looks at your face and the items.

5. If your child likes music, you can turn on a music player and do some funny actions or movements following the rhythm and help her to do the actions. Reinforce her every effort to do the action. You can also use colourful balloons and keep tossing them following the beats. Help your child to do the same. Praise her for every attempt that she makes.

These ideas may not work for everyone. Some children might find it challenging. Their focus of interests might be different. Try to find out what exactly motivates them and create opportunities for your child to share his/her attention.

Developing language and communication skills through Pretend play using Puppets

Pretend play or symbolic play is particularly important in early childhood development because it involves using symbols. It enhances child’s imagination, develops critical cognitive skills, language and communications, social relationships without presenting any demand. When we use symbols, we use ‘something’ that stands for ‘something else’. Pretend play and language both involve the same underlying ability to represent things symbolically.

Steps to create a pretend play using Puppet –

• Create a character.
• Specify what the character likes to do.
• Create a storyline for the character.
• Create a backdrop and setting to specify the scene.
• Create some dialogues for your child that describes her/his conversation with the pretended character.
• Make the character as funny as possible.
• Choose a character that your child likes.
• Make the backdrop based on situation.
• Dialogues should be simple and ready before starting so that the flow is uninterrupted.
• Different concepts, emotional values and social scenarios can be taught using this, which leads to develop a better language and communication skill.
• Keep it simple and fun.
• First let your imagination lead and then encourage your child add his/her.
• Exaggerate and reinforce every attempt initiated by the child.
• Have lots of fun!

What is Pairing? Why is Pairing important to run a session? How pairing can help building instructional control?

Simply put, ‘Pairing’ refers to building rapport with a child we are working with. In other words when we work with a child with special need, we need to pair or associate ourselves with a reinforcer that the child likes. So, we become a reinforcement for the child. Gaining the child’s trust is the most critical contingency prior to work. The more we build rapport, the more the child opens up. We can see an increased compliance and instructional control over the child’s repertoire.

Teaching new skills become much easier when we associate ourselves with reinforcement. Focussing on the child’s motivation learning happens to be more interesting when it is done through play or in a natural environment. A playful way of teaching and learning is always preferred and motivating for the child. Building a strong rapport also helps in Development of language and communication skills as well as social interaction with others.

Suppose we want a child to follow instructions and rules whenever presented. But the child ends up showing noncompliance to each instruction in return. To build any foundation of skills teaching compliance and instruction control is very important in children. Here are a few examples of noncompliance:

Lack of cooperation
Not listening to the instructions given
Ending up tasks with an unacceptable behaviour

Many parents face these situations every day. Many of them lose their cool and end up in a ‘tug of war’ with their children. Most likely, lack of compliance in a child hinders his/her learning. Both teaching and learning become stressful.

Let us now try to understand the impact of pairing on a child’s instructional control with an example. We had a four-year-old (age changed) school going child Amit (name changed) coming to the clinic (place changed) for sessions. He needed support for developing language & communication and play skills. He did not exhibit any meaningful play skills in his repertoire in the beginning. He used to put all the toys down on the floor and arrange them in a row. If anyone tried to join him, he would throw them all over the places and run away. He showed all possible instances of noncompliance. The therapist focussed on pairing herself with the highest reinforcer of the child in a natural environment setting. she listed down all the high valued reinforcers for the child and planned for a structured play through contriving the situations where the child would get more naturally occurring opportunities. There the child would show some interest on her involvement and would willingly wait for her to add something interesting to the game. Slowly the child started waiting and making requests. Next, the therapist started adding very simple and easy instructions in the game. The ultimate breakthrough was when the child realised that therapist was a “giver” of the reinforcement without any demand. When the child developed trust on her, she gradually incorporated more instructions which he started following. Every correct and expected response was positively reinforced through lots of verbal praise and highest reinforcer.

Pairing never ends.

Some tips for pairing:

Plan your activities from all aspects ahead
Observe the child very minutely and list all tangible items and activities that the child likes most
Interact with the child in a way that he/she find funny and interesting
Being a “giver” offer the items that the child likes, non-contingently
Avoid placing any demand to the child when you are engaged in pairing activities
Plan for silly games and silly activities that will ensure an active participation of the child
Restrict the special items for learning or practice time so that those are freely available all the time
Make sure the items are varied so the child never gets satiated or bored by the items
Bring the “child” within you – tickles, hugs, high-fives, food, drinks, bubbles, messy things or plays try every possible thing that can make the child happy
Exaggerate with verbal praise for every positive attempt made by the child
Most importantly, be yourself, enjoy and have fun