TRANSCRIPT - Active Learning Practices & Examples Ð 4/25/23

>>Patty: So this is Isaac and RJ, two of our students here at Penrickton Center for Blind Children. We're going to be discussing emotional and social development in children and how to encourage those skills using Active Learning. I just wanted to do some quick definitions that we all want to be on the same page what we're talking about here. Social development is really the gradual acquisition of certain skills, attitudes, relationships, and behaviors that really enable an individual to interact with others and to function as a member of society. So to be able to acquire those skills, you have to have certain social skills. And that's a set of abilities that enables an individual to actually interact or competently and appropriately -- act appropriately in a given social environment or context. So social development and social skills are completely different than emotional development and emotional skills. And today I'm going to focus quite a bit on emotional development, even more than social development and how it impacts kids when you're doing Active Learning activities.

So emotional development is the gradual capacity to experience, express, and interpret a full range of emotions and to be able to cope with those emotions appropriately. So let's just talk about some basic emotional skills. So a person who has a good emotional development is going to be able to identify and understand their own feelings. And if you think about kids who have visual impairments or multiple disabilities, you know, if they're unable to speak and they're unable to communicate with us, are they able to identify or understand their own feelings? Are they able to know when they're happy, when they're mad, when they're sad, when they're frustrated? And then even more importantly, can they read and comprehend the emotional states of other people? And when you work with someone who is blind or who has a visual impairment, just think about how much vision we use to understand other people's emotional states. I can tell when my co-workers are having a good day or a bad day just by walking in and looking at their faces. But now think about people's voices and if I talk to you in a kind of mundane kind of language, you can tell I'm feeling one way. If I talk really like this, you can tell maybe I'm more upbeat. Or if I talk like this, you can kind of tell that I'm upset. So someone who has a visual impairment or blindness can read the emotional states of other people using voice. Sometimes using auditory cues like how fast someone's walking, how slow they're walking can give you information. So we need our kids to be able to accurately read and comprehend emotional states in other people. Now a another core feature is you have to be able to manage core motions and express them in a constructive manner. What we're really going to talk about today are those kids that are having temper tantrums or some kind of behavior issue where they don't know how to manage their strong emotions in a constructive manner and how can we help them with some appropriate Active Learning activities. Kids have to be able to regulate their own behavior and then they also need to empathize with other people. It's a skill to be able to identify how other people are feeling but also how to relate to how other people are feeling. And once you can identify how you're feeling, recognize how other people are feeling, manage your own emotions, at that point you start to establish and maintain relationships with other people and you learn to interact with other people, which is when we get into social skills. So if you can think about emotional development as the basis for social skills, you have to have a good core emotional development to learn those social skills. So I put this slide in here just because I wanted you to be able to understand your own emotional development. So how well do you know how you respond when you're under stress? And you need to know what frustrates you. You need to understand what gets under your skin and how you react in those stressful situations because that's going to influence your response to kids when they're in a stressful situation. So there's -- on the internet there's tons of assessment tools that you can use, and I strongly encourage you to do some of those assessments yourself so that you can understand where you have a good emotional development and where there are things that you could be working on as well. Now we're going to get to the dynamic learning circle. It's very important -- we talk about the dynamic learning circle all the time with Active Learning but I want to make sure you're paying attention to the dynamic learning circle in regards to emotional and social development. If we can briefly go through those four stages of the dynamic learning circle, the child is going to be aware or interested in something in the environment. Are they aware of their own motor or sensory activities? Are they aware of activities or objects in the environment? For emotional and social development, are they aware of people in the environment? And the individuals in their environment, are they aware of their social and communication activities?

Once a child is aware of other people in the environment, if they start acting and interacting with adults or other children, do they then learn from those interactions? So are they repeating an activity? Are they making memories about those activities? Are they experimenting and exploring with those activities? For example, just think of a little baby who starts smiling and you smile back. Or they start cooing at you and you coo back. That is the beginning of establishing an emotional response to what somebody else is doing with you. So a child starts to share his or her experiences with other people. And it can be a nonverbal sharing, it can be a verbal sharing.

It could be a touch where they move their arm towards somebody. Do they respond verbally and nonverbally to the communication of other people? They start imitating the activity of other people? So as a child is first aware of others in the environment, then they start interacting with someone in the environment. At some point they're going to hit stage three, which is they have learned something from someone. And then that interaction becomes something that they've learned and becomes part of them where they have completed learning that activity and now they're ready for something new. So, for example, I was just trying to think of some of the kids that have no disabilities and when you're interacting with them at a very young age and you're playing peek-a-boo. At some point, why don't we play peek-a-boo with 6-year-olds? At some point they have learned what happens with peek-a-boo and it's something they're familiar with and it's a boring activity so now we're moving on to something else. So at age 21 we're all not still playing peek-a-boo, typically, with one another. At some point kids learn social gains and they have learned all they can from that activity and they're ready to move on to something else. That's what we are going to be talking about today is understanding someone's emotional and social skills and how to present activities so that they can learn and grow their emotional development. So remember why am I talking about emotional development? Well, it really leads to awareness of self. It leads to social awareness. It leads to emotional regulation. It leads to making responsible decisions. And it leads to building relationships. So people who have difficulty managing their emotions can struggle and they can struggle academically. They can struggle behaviorally. They can struggle physically. Just in talking about myself, I am a person that when I'm stressed, I respond by eating, which is a completely inappropriate way of responding to stress. And so that would be a way to physically be responding that's not a healthy way of responding to a stress. And so we want to try to teach our kids appropriate ways to manage stress and how to deal with stressful situations in a positive way. So why else is emotional development important? Your emotional core influences all your other areas of learning. If you think about driving in bad weather conditions, you're usually going to stress and hold on to the steering wheel and when you get home you're going to realize how much your muscles were contracting while you were on that steering wheel. And did you really enjoy the drive when you were that stressed? Typically you are not. If you're stressed out and not handling your emotions properly, it really influences the other areas, including learning. So a good emotional foundation supports executive function, when it's well regulated, and when it's not well regulated, it's going to interfere with executive function. So if we want our children to learn, they have to have a good core emotional development. It's the foundation for how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about other people, and how we experience others in the environment. Now when you're talking about executive function as how your brain is working, just remember that the frontal lobe, the front part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex is really what we use to regulate our emotions. So if you're ever working with a child who has shaken baby syndrome, typically someone will grab a child and shake them front to back and the part of the brain that can get damaged is that prefrontal cortex, that frontal lobe. Kids that have had brain damage to that area of the brain may have difficulty regulating their emotions. So that front part of the brain helps us to plan, helps us to maintain attention, focus our attention on an activity. It helps us to remember instructions. It helps us to struggle multiple tasks and it helps us to link things from what's happening today to what happened in the past. And one of the things that's really interesting about the prefrontal cortex is it develops very slowly and it takes almost until we're 20 years of age before it matures. And so when we're talking about somebody -- for example, I have known people who have the skills to drive a vehicle at age 16 but they may not have the maturity or the emotional development to drive a car yet at 16. So a lot of times you can compare it to somebody just because you have the physical ability to do a task, doesn't mean that you have the emotional skills to perform a task. If you just think about when you're letting someone baby sit your children, you're not just looking at an age. You're usually looking at how emotionally developed they are, whether or not they're able to handle the responsibility of watching another child. So executive function also helps with working memory. So are we able to retain and use information? Can we sustain or shift our attention when we get different kinds of demands or when we're in different roles at different settings, can we adapt what we're doing at home to what happens at school, to what happens at grandma's house. Executive function helps you to have self-control, so it helps you resist those impulsive actions and responses. If you ever watch videos of kids and they put candy in front of a child and they say, okay, I'm going to leave the room but don't touch that candy until I come back. And then you leave the room and they put video cameras on the kids and some of the kids don't touch the candy and some of the kids do touch the candy. And it's whether or not the kids have gotten to an emotional level that they can follow rules. And so when we're working with kids with multiple disabilities, do we give them rules that they're emotionally not able to follow yet? And if that's the case, then we need to look at the activities that we're suggesting for those children to make sure that they have the working memory, the mental flexibility, and the self-control to follow those activities. So I use this slide quite a bit. I think most people have seen a slide like this but when we have kids that have behavior issues, they're just red flags for something is going on underneath. And if you think about your emotional core, if a kid is yelling, screaming, biting themselves, that's the tip of the iceberg. What we have to do is get down below and figure out what is going on with their emotional development for those types of behaviors to be happening.

And once we understand where the kids are functioning emotionally, we can set up the right activities that will allow them tho feel that they're safe and that they can try new things and that they can handle things when there's problems in the activities that we're doing. So I just want to talk about a couple of stress responses that kids have to typically stress. So usually when activities or the tasks or the responsibilities or the requirements, when the things that we ask our children to do do not match the developmental level of child, that's when you usually have a stress response. So I don't know if you have ever had a bad day at work where you have all kinds of things going wrong and somebody asks you to do just one more thing and you're just overwhelmed or overloaded or can't handle those kind of requirements, most people are going to respond by a stress response. And usually we're going to be an internal stress response or an external stress response. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm an either so when I'm stressed I grab a cup of tea or some food. I'm an internalizer. I tend to handle my stress by turning inward. You might have kids that pretend to fall asleep on you or they try to bite themselves or hit themselves or they shut down and just kind of ignore what's going on. Or you're going to have the kids that are externalizers and those are the people who actually start to act out. So it might be screaming. It might be trying to bite. It might be trying to hit. It could be trying to run away. So typically those are stress responses to something in the environment. It's either that the kids can't make sense of what's going on in the world, it's overwhelming, or the tasks they're being asked to do are too hard for them and don't match the developmental levels of what they can achieve. So now I'm just going to try to explain all of the information I'm providing today. This is one of the more complicated topics with Active Learning. When I first started doing Active Learning, I ignored this topic for about five years and I just focused on using activities. You know, how can I get someone with a physical disability to be able to reach and grab for a toy? Or how could I get somebody to learn to roll over or sit up? That's actually the easier part of Active Learning. The harder part is understanding that kids have what's called an emotional level and they also have an intellectual level, and those are two different skills. So the best way that I can describe understanding the two is talking about a task. So let's say we have a child who's autistic, who's got visual impairment or is legally blind. And we ask that child to sit down at the table and work a six-piece shape sorter puzzle. I would ask you guys to think about at what age can a typical child, without a disability, work a six-piece shape sorter puzzle? And the answer to that question is most kids can work a six-piece puzzle by the age of 3. So that is a skill level that they can achieve. So let's say we take that child who has autism, as well as a visual impairment, and we ask them to come over and work the six-piece puzzle, and they won't do it. But they will do it if we say something to them like, listen, if you sit down and work this puzzle at the table, when you're done, you can go do whatever it is you want to do but you have to do this puzzle first. So now the child sits at the table and they start getting distracted and they want to get up and you start giving verbal prompts and you start giving physical prompts and reminding them that when they finish this task they can go and do what they want. So now the child has finished the task. Maybe it takes 15 minutes were 10 or 15 reminders, and they get up and you say, okay, you can do what you want. Now that child goes over to a bucket of toys and they pick up some items and they start banging those objects on their hand or on their chin or on the table. So at what age does a child, without a disability, bang on their hand, on their chin, on the table? And typically banging occurs at a 6 to 9-month-old level.

So that is the difference between the emotional level of this child that's autistic with visual impairments, and the intellectual level. So the intellectual level is the skill level that that child has and that's not the same thing where the child views himself. When you leave a child alone and you don't put any demands on that child, what kind of activities does that child engage in? And typically that is representative of an emotional level of that child. So somebody who is flicking and banging all the time typically will have an emotional level of about a 6 to 9-month-old, even though they have the intellectual ability to do tasks that a 3-year-old would do. And here's where the problem comes in is when you as a teacher or a therapist or a parent looks at that child, you're going to say, well, they can work the six-piece puzzle so they're at 3 years of age. I want them to get to be 4 years of age so I'm going to ask them to do activities at a 3-year-old level and higher to try to get them to learn new tasks. But the problem is that child actually sees himself as a 6 to 9-month-old and so we're asking them to do skills that are three years higher than what they feel comfortable performing. So there's a conflict that arises here because the intellectual level is typically the level that the parent or the teacher sees that child. They see that kid as a 3-year-old.

But the child sees himself as a 6 to 9-month-old, and that creates a conflict. They don't understand one another. So how can I better explain it? Hopefully with this slide. There's a gap between the intellectual level and the emotional level of that child. So in this diagram, this black arrow represents the 6 to 9-month-old level, emotional level, and at 3 years it's is intellectual level. And that's our gap. If you, as a teacher or parent, are building up on this 3-year-old level, you're going to raise that gap and make it bigger. And what happens over time is we keep asking the kids to do things that are at higher and higher and higher levels until eventually all of a sudden we get a 12-year-old who figures out that if they just punch hard enough, hit hard enough, bite, scream, or yell hard enough they can make people leave them alone and they'll get to do what they want, and they end up isolated where they don't want to be around others to learn from them because every time they're around someone, people are asking them to be somebody that they don't understand. So instead, if we were to do activities and increase that emotional level, down here at the 6 to 9-month-old level, if we would start working on those skills that a child is missing emotionally, what we end up doing is we raise the emotional level and, at the same time, we raise up that intellectual level and we usually reduce the gap between the two. And all of a sudden you have a child who starts to understand what other people are trying to communicate with them, because we're talking the same emotional level instead of a different emotional level. So I'm just going to take -- I know that that's a lot of complicated information in 25 minutes right now. I just wanted to take a quick pause to make sure that nobody has a question so far.

>>Kaycee: No questions in the chat yet. Just somebody sharing they love this comparison. Thank you.

>>Patty: Okay. Just double checking. So what I wanted to explain really briefly, now that I kind of explained the gap, is there's a certain progression that's a developmental progression that all kids go through as you're becoming more emotionally mature. And what we need to do when we're working with kids that have multiple disabilities is really look at those lower levels and be able to identify them in kids that are 12 years of age but maybe still acting like a 3-month-old emotionally. Because the goal is to raise the emotional level. And I don't want you to remember the age ranges, I just want you to remember that one emotional level leads to the next one and they build on top of each other. And I'm only going to talk about kids under the age of 5. Once they get above age 5, it's a lot easier to find information that you can read about emotional development online. But I find it extremely difficult to find things on kids that are under the age of 5. And this is all from the book, are you blind? So you can also read that information, if you would like, on your own. Typically at a very young age a child without disabilities, from zero to 3 months of age, when they're trying to connect to an adult, how do they do that? Because they don't know how to say, hi, Patty, how are you today? Typically a zero to 3-month-old is going to clutch on to you.

You give them a finger, they hold your finger. You give them a bottle, they clutch on to a bottle or the nipple. If you hold them close to you, they tend to kind of move their hands in a scratching motion on your shirt. Or if your hair is hanging long, like mine, they'll get their little finger wrapped around the hair and they'll be pulling on your hair. They really connect to an adult by clutching, smacking, grabbing, scratching. And we as adults think a zero to 3-month-old, that that behavior is perfectly fine and acceptable because that's what $3-month-olds do. The problem is when you have a 12-year-old who is emotionally still at a zero to 3-month-old, they tend to scratch, clutch, and grab as a way of grabbing or connecting with an adult. And so what you might see are behaviors that include pinching, scratching, and biting. And instead of us recognizing that they are maybe connecting with us, typically most adults are telling them to stop those behaviors. Don't bite. Don't pinch. Don't scratch. Don't do that.

We don't want kids to bite, scratch, and pinch. I'm just saying that if you have kids that are acting with those behaviors, that quite often it can be because they're way down at a 3-month-old emotional level. So, for example, I have -- I'll give you the example in a minute after I cover a few examples of different developmental levels. No, I'll go ahead and say it now. So we have one child here -- actually I have had multiple children here at Penrickton Center who tend to try to pinch me, scratch, or bite. And so Dr. Nielsen a long time ago gave me a suggestion. She said when you have kids that do that, they need a different way of connecting where they can grab that's more appropriate. And so she said have you ever thought about just holding their arm and giving them a nice, gentle squeeze? So I started doing that with one of my kids here who would always bite or be chewing on things. I would give her a squeeze. After about a year, I would reach her hand and she would give me a nice squeeze and she wouldn't try to pinch or grasp anymore. As an adult, we're trying to show the kids that they can still connect to us in that way that they want to clutch, grab, or squeeze but in a way that's appropriate versus not appropriate. Then what happens is as the kids developmentally go from that zero to 3-month-old age, when they hit 4 to 6 they start gaining more skills, they start to use their voice. So now they start to babble or cry and when they cry they start to figure out that when I cry someone gives me a bottle or somebody changes my diaper or somebody holds me. So crying is getting me something and the kids start to use their voice to connect to an adult more than they do from clutching, grabbing, or scratching. So there's a transition. Now what you might see in kids developmentally who have disabilities, who are at a 4-month-old to 6-month-old level, you may see them using their voice to gain attention from people. Again, they're older and they're louder so what are they going to do? They start screaming and yelling. What do we do as adults? We usually tell them use your inside voice. Use your inside voice. So if we can recognize that they're using their voice, instead of always saying use your inside voice, we can start modeling activities and behaviors like using our voice in different ways to communicate. So with that same child I told you about where I started to do the squeeze hello, over time I would sit next to her she sometimes would grunt or make a sound and go --

[Grunting sounds] Not only would I give her a squeeze hello, but I would --

[Grunting] And I would start using my voice in different ways, not just a yell, so that over the time she started using her voice to communicate her needs instead of pinching and grasping. I looked at that as a way that I was moving her emotionally up a higher developmental skill level. Then when the kids get to 6 to 8 months, you have a child that's typically growing. When you pick them up and hold them, they kind of want their body to be held in a certain position. They want to hold their head up a certain way, they want to move their arms a certain way. It's, again, recognizing that a child with physical disabilities, emotional disabilities, or visual impairments use their body in a way they want to use it. Having someone tell them not to hold their head to the side or not to put their arm in a certain position, they get real insistent that they want control over their bodies, and they should be able to hold their bodies how they want to hold it. So it's recognizing that in the kids. At 10 months of age, they start to show objects and share interest in objects by -- for example, I have a pen here so if I want you to see my object, I'm going to hold it out to you. Here, do you see it? I want an adult to say, yes, I see it. But not try to take it. A child who is showing does not want you to take their objects. They are just looking to see what happens when they show it to you. If you take it, you actually lose the trust of that child. And if you don't pay attention to them when they're trying to show you, they'll start banging on something to get your attention. So this is the age range where kids are starting to bang. So if you have head bangers, if you have kids that are banging objects loudly or banging on the wall, banging on the table, a lot of times that's a child who developmentally is at that 10-month-old level. Then from that usually you have a 12-month-old who has learned to move. These are kids who usually have learned to crawl and move around the room. So these are the kids that like to know you're still around but they're so businesses figuring out how to move that they do a fly by. They crawl, they come up to you, they want you to pick them up and as soon as you pick them up, they want to get back down on the ground again to run around the room. Remember, these are the kids that want to know you're there and then they want to go do their own thing but come back and check on you to see whether or not you're still there. Then you get to 15 months old. These are kids who want to go ahead and give you a toy. Let's say I'm playing with a ball. I'm going to be banging the ball. I'm going to reach out to give it to you. I want you to take the ball briefly and what I want to see you do, as a child, is I want to see that you know how to play like I know how to play. So I don't want you to take the ball and dribble it on the ground. If I was holding the ball and banging it, I want to see that I give you the ball, you bang the ball and then you give the ball right back to me. Because now as a child I'm understanding that there's somebody else out there that plays like me. And I'm starting to trust that I can give you something but you're going to give it back. You're not going to take it from me. So this is a kid that's starting to learn to share a toy. Then as they get a little bit older as 18 months, they actually will let someone borrow a toy for a short period of time and then get it back. They're also doing building games. Then as we get older, from 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 we get kids who are interfering in activities that adults are doing. They are imitating domestic activities like setting the table, doing the laundry. They start to do creative things like pretend play. They start to color. They're starting to create things. And then lastly, at age 5, they're starting to play games with their friends where they're learning rules and there's somebody in charge. And the kids are starting to argue amongst one another and figuring out how to cooperate with one another. That's kind of a developmental progression for kids with their emotional development from zero to 5. So here I have two of my kids. I just thought I would show you a little interaction with them.

[Singing]

>>This a way, that a way.

>>Yay!

>>Patty: I have Devon on the right, Vivian on the left, and that's Crystal, one of our staff members. Devon has a 3-month-old to 4-month-old level. He likes to hit people. He likes to bite people, pinch, and he likes to scratch. On the left side I've got Vivian who is way up at a 3 to 4-year-old level. She likes to play pretend.

She plays house. She pretends to drive the bus. She knows how to talk and walk. But Devon, on the right, has just recently learned to use his voice. He did not know how to talk when he started at Penrickton Center. The problem is Devon, when he first walks around the room, he walks around and hits everybody. I come up and do a squeeze hello and now he doesn't hit anyone. He comes up and says, squeeze, hello. If you give him a squeeze, he knows how to say hello that way. Every once in a while he goes back to the hitting but for the most part he's figured out how to do a squeeze. The hard part is that if Vivian knows Devon is in the area she could get hit by him because he sometimes hits. She's a little nervous to be on the swing with Devon, but if you always keep Devon away from Vivian, then you are never using these kind of interactions to teach both kids that it's safe and that you're going to help control the environment so that Devon gets a little interaction with Vivian and Vivian gets a little interaction with Devon. And that the adult in the middle is going to control the situation. So they're going to sit and sing.

>>I want to sing.

[Singing]

>>This a way, that a way. This a way, that a way.

>>This a way, that a way. Wish a way, that a way.

>>Patty: You saw Devon go over and give her a little squeeze on the arm, and she's protecting the arm. He is not squeezing in a hard way or any way to hurt her, but she's a little nervous because he's reaching out to squeeze and so we explained to Vivian he's saying hello and he's learning to say hello the right way. But when you're talking about social and emotional levels, this is two different kids at two completely different emotional levels and how can we address both kids' needs at the same time in a safe way where they can both learn from each other. That's just one instance. And then I just want to point out kid's social interaction at a young age as well. When kids are young, at zero to 3 months old, they play by themselves. First solitary play happens where kids are playing independently without interaction from other kids. Then at 1 to 2 years of age they start paying attention to what other people are doing. Then at age 2 to 3, they start doing parallel play where they're next to one another. Then you get to associative play where they're interacting. Lastly, cooperative play where they're learning from one another. So Vivian, in the last video, is way up at associative play and she can do some cooperative play. Where Devon is all the way down at sometimes onlooker play. On a rare occasion, parallel play. So you have kids at different levels and so you have to recognize what are they capable of doing when we ask them to do a task? And Devon is not capable yet of following lots of directions because he's primarily interested in what he's doing. Where Vivian is capable of following some directions because she's at a higher emotional level. So if we take the two kids here, we have Michael and Devon here on the drum. And they're banging on the drum.

[Drumming]

That's Devon banging. And then you have Michael.

[Drumming]

>>Patty: Just in that video, Devon is interested in what Devon is doing, the child on the right. Michael is actually paying attention to what Devon is doing. So it's great that they're sitting next to each other in parallel play doing the same activity, but recognizing that telling Devon what to do is not his emotional level. Where Michael could probably follow a beat and sing a song, and Devon will actually follow along too but Devon wants to control the environment, because he's at a lower level. Where Michael can maybe start to introduce some imitation with banging on the drum at different levels. So here we have the first slide I showed you. So here's Isaac and RJ. RJ is in a wheelchair. He has cerebral palsy. He knows how to activate switches. We have Isaac on the left. He's autistic. When he was 2 he would throw nice temper tantrums trying to get his way. He's been at Penrickton Center for ten years and he's really learned to where he does the laundry, he follows directions. But when we take him out to a fair, if something doesn't go right, he'll start whining and crying and I'll look at Isaac and go, Isaac, is that really working for you? He goes, no. I say, why are you doing it? He'll stop. Where RJ is a kid who is emotionally weighed down at like a 4 to 6-month-old level. But I just wanted you to see the interaction between the two. So Isaac's asking him to light it up. RJ is trying to hit the switch.

>>Try again.

>>Patty: Now RJ has hit the switch and that activated the tank and made it light up. What's fun is that in the old days Isaac would have just gone over to hit the switch because impulsively he wants to hit the switch and he is -- his emotional level is so high that he recognizes the emotional state of RJ. He knows to let RJ hit the switch and to be excited for RJ. And to share in that joy of RJ being able to do it. Where a kid at a lower emotional level would not have the impulse control. They would have to go over and hit the switch themselves. So in that situation I need to have two switches. One for Isaac and one for RJ because they can't wait and take turns. They both have to have those activities so that they can activate them on their own. So when Lily's working with kids in emotional levels, there's five phases she's going to work with with kids. Like I said, this topic is a really difficult topic to try to cover in an hour but I just thought I would try to whet your whistle. I would encourage you to read the book, are you blind? For more information or look at the website when we're done. But there's five phases that you go through and you're going to start with the first one, which is offering . And then you're going to move to imitation and then go up to interaction. Sharing the work. And lastly, consequences. Now this is not the dynamic learning circle. You don't go from stage one to stage two to stage three to stage four and then go back to one. When you're doing this, you start at stage one and you try to move up to maybe stage two. And then when a kid can do stage two, you try to move up to stage three. But when a child isn't responding, you always go back down.

So when I'm working with anyone, I always start with offering. So let me give you some examples. So with offering, the key thing is that you are not allowed to ask the child to do anything. There's no demand put on a child. You let them play or interact with the objects in any way they want to and the whole goal is to just promote trust between you and the child, to observe their reactions, to learn what they like or don't like, and to introduce self-activity. Think about the times that you go over to someone's house and you meet a child of maybe the age of a year old. Do you run over and pick that kid up right away? No. What you want to do is sit next to the kid, even if they're two. If they're playing with toys, you might sit in the area and play toys near them. But you don't immediately demand that a child respond to you. That actually scares the kids and makes them want to run away. What we're trying to do is have a child understand no matter what you do I'm going to stay in your area and play with toys just like you. And they start to learn that they can trust adults in their space. So let me show you a video. Here's Brian.

>>Ready? Here we go.

>>Patty: Brian is sitting in his wheelchair.
[Clanking noises]

>>Patty: Brian just has a washboard made of metal and we have play sticks made of plastic and he's holding the plastic play stick and he's moving his hand on the washboard.
[Clanging noises]

>>Patty: I'm going to fast forward a little bit so you can see. I've added some paper. See how now Brian's putting one of the dowel rods in his mouth? When you're in the stage of offering, you never correct a kid and tell them not to do something. So I don't care if he puts that dowel rod in his mouth, that's fine with me, especially because he has a lower emotional level. I'm going to expect that he put something in his mouth. As we keep going, what happens, if it's interesting enough, he's going to bring it back down to the board and start making noise on it again. And as you're watching this video, if you ask yourself what is my role in this video? My role is just to be a support person. It's to make sure that the objects are there. Make sure he can grab on to them. Make sure that they don't fall off the tray, and allow him to be independently active. And then every once in a while I might try to motive up to the next level, which is imitation. So I might imitate his behavior by rubbing something on the washboard to see if he's paying attention to me. If he's not paying attention to me, how can he learn from me? So as long as he knows I'm there and he knows I'm doing an activity -- but until he's ready to imitate my behavior, he is not going to move up to imitation, he's going to stay down at offering. And my job is to continue to offer developmentally-appropriate activities for him to learn from and for him to understand that I'm in his area. I'm watching what he's done. I see what he's doing. I'm share in the joy of what he's doing but I'm not going to make him do something that he's not ready for yet. And then here's Oliver sitting with Amanda and they're just going to be Ð
[Banging] 

Oliver is putting balls into containers.

[Drumming in the background] Whoops. Sorry. So at this point, with Oliver -- let me go back a little bit. So Oliver just was shaking the ping-pong balls and putting them in and out of the containers, and Amanda is doing the same thing. If you look at the interaction, Oliver's really not paying too much attention to Amanda. He knows she's there but he's really not learning from her yet. And so we're still in that stage of offering. And every once in a while Amanda is going to try to introduce a new activity. But if he doesn't imitate her then she stays in that stage of offering, because that's the emotional level that he's at right now. The stage that comes after that is imitation, and that's where you're trying to introduce new activities to a child to see if they'll imitate you. So here's Johnovan and I'm trying to have him imitate me with stacking plates and cups to knock them over.

>>Can we go to bed --

>>Patty: So as I'm stacking the plates I'm saying cups and plate and cup and plate. Oh!

>>You want me to do it?

>>Patty: Sure.

>>I'm going to do it in the tube.

>>Patty: So now he's imitating stacking the plates. Now one of the things he says is do you want me to push them over? And I don't respond to him and say, yes, push them over. With emotional development, you're trying to have kids participate in activities because they want to, not because they're being told what to do all the time. I want him to problem solve, understand things are falling over, and to push them off, if he wants to. I might answer him once but if you hear him, he'll say, do you want me to push them over? Do you want me to push them over? That's because when people talk to him, they tell him what to do all the time and that's not how we typically interact with one another with communication. So it's really learning to communicate with the kids telling him to do something once and stopping. We really want him to push those over because he wants to, not because I'm telling him to push them over. For example, here's Devon. He's just got chime balls and he's banging them together and dropping them in a bowl.
[Laughter]

>>Yee-haw!


>>Patty: I love that she's imitating his vocal sounds as much as she's imitating his fine motor skills.
[Humming]


>>Patty: And here she's trying to shake the ball so he can hear. Shaking the ball is different than banging a ball and she's trying to see if he'll imitate shaking. But, remember Devon is at that lower level. He tries to bite people sometimes and so using her voice to imitate his voice and see if he'll do different vocalizations is a higher emotional level than just mouthing things.


>>Kaycee: There was a quick question that came in about that metal washboard and where do you buy something like that?


>>Patty: Yeah, it's $80. I want to say it was either from west music or music is elementary. I can e-mail you where they found it. They make smaller ones for about $10 but they're not as good as that washboard. It hangs from your chest and you can strum on it. It is called a washboard. I'll e-mail you where you can get it, because I know we ordered it just a couple of years ago. We have like four of those. And then I will say, as you get higher -- I know I only have a couple more minutes. The next level would be interaction. Here's an example of kids doing something with an adult where one person has to do part of the task and the other does part of the task. This is just rolling a big barrel back and forth. And there's balls inside. And you might say, hey, this all looks like fun. It is fun but what we're teaching is that we can participate in an activity with the kids. We want the kids to be paying attention to us so they'll learn from us. First they have to be aware we're there, then they have to want to imitate our behavior. Then they need to be able to interact with us. And they have to learn when we're happy, when we're sad, and when we're mad. Because if you want a kid to follow your directions, they have to build up all these emotional skills until they finally have the emotional level where you can say, hey, Zander, I need you to sit here for five minutes and I'll be right back. And he'll actually listen to you. That takes, in a typical growing kid, at least five to six years to learn that information. Our kids could be 13 years of age and still be emotionally way down at that 9-month-old level. Those are the things we're trying to work on with some of these activities.
 Here I have Javargas. They're carving a pumpkin together. Let me go back a little bit. She was helping him learn how to pound a hammer, because he hadn't done that before. And learn to use his finger to push the pumpkin piece out. So, again, that's an activity that they're interacting together. But at no time is Jessica asking him to do is whole task, because he's not capable of it. I know I only have five minutes, so this is what I'm going to do really quickly. The next one after that is sharing the work. You do a task together. So, for example, here I've cut out all the shapes and Jaylen is going to glue them on. At the very end is going to be consequences. I'll let you watch this video and then I'll stop. Here he is with a hula hoop and he is ducking and covering because he has now learned he can get hit in the head with the hula hoop. We're going to allow him the consequences of his own actions. And he still thinks it's fun to twirl the hula hoop. Let me stop sharing really quick here. I know I have gone through that super, super fast but it's about when we're doing activities and working on the emotional level, stop thinking so much about the task and start thinking about the emotional interaction between you and the student. And, remember, that they're going to learn more from you if they trust you and if they want to imitate you. If they're running away from you to get away from you because every time you're coming to ask them to do something, it's not going to meet their developmental skill level, then they're going to view you as a person who doesn't talk their language and they want to get away from you as opposed to learn from you. So if we can act like the kids, they'll want to hang around us, which means that we can start acting a little differently, which means we can teach them new skills.