“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

Larry Elder Obviously Brycen is making progress across the board because we have changed his goals recently for Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy at the clinic, as well as Speech Therapy at school.  Occupational Therapy is mostly working on fine-tuning the skills he has...such as completing the entire act of zipping his coat (pretty much done), as well as building strength in his arms throwing overhand, working on decreasing the size of his writing skills (can write all letters and numbers, but size is quite large and all over the place), and then learning how to write his phone number and address (he can already find the info on his device, but we want him to know how to communicate it without his device).  In both Speech therapies, we are focusing on more functional communication and using his device to form phrases (stringing at least 2 buttons together) and to make more than just requests.  After discussing this with multiple team members this week, I came home yesterday mentally exhausted on how to start all of this.  It seems easy, right?!  Just program a bunch of words in a page on the device?!  Well, to be honest, it's so much harder than that.  I thought I knew not to take spoken language for granted a couple years ago...but I'm starting to REALLY see not to take it for granted as we progress along with his usage of the AAC device, but not progress along much with his spoken language skills.  Programming basic words in the device is easy...it's categorizing them into pages that he will understand (verbs, nouns, adjectives), and keeping up with what typical 5 yr olds comment or discuss with the people around them on a daily basis, while also not overwhelming him with the entire process.  Using an AAC device just isn't "natural" like spoken language is to the majority of people...there is a learning curve that goes much deeper than the curve associated with spoken language. I spent this morning googling a bunch of websites about "core language"...and was lucky to stumble upon an awesome site that actually focuses on the stages of language and how to keep adding on to each stage as he learns!  Very excited to research this more and get started on this new "stage" of Brycen's development with his AAC device! http://www.aaclanguagelab.com/ So like the quote above says...we can't set a goal without a plan on how to achieve this goal, otherwise it's just a wish of what we want for him!  It's about our action and motivation to achieve these goals WITH him!