Focus Areas

FOCUS AREAS

We have four main focus areas in addition to catering to a wider range of individualised and unique needs

Reducing Challenging Behaviours

A behaviour is considered “challenging” when it interferes with your child’s ability to learn or integrate socially, or when it poses a risk of harm to self or others, or when it poses a risk of damage to property. Some of the challenging behaviours our team has experience in managing and reducing include aggression, elopement (running away), tantrums which are excessive in terms of intensity, frequency or duration, self-injury, self-stimulatory behaviours (e.g. toe-walking or repetitively spinning in circles), swearing, lying, stealing, and mouthing or pica (ingesting inedible items). Your child will have a Behaviour Support Plan tailor-made for them, and you will be trained to implement it alongside your ABA team. Consistency between you and your ABA team will lead to the quickest possible results.

Reaching Developmental Milestones

Your child will be assessed according to a comprehensive list of developmental milestones. This will produce a detailed profile of the skills your child has and has not developed in comparison to the majority of their same-age peers. An individualized treatment plan will then be designed for your child, which serves as a road-map for teaching the missing or underdeveloped skills. This requires extensive knowledge of typical childhood development, and the prerequisites that need to be in place before your child will be able to advance to more complex skills.

Acquiring Foundational Academic Skills

We consider “foundational academic skills” to be those pivotal skills that lay the foundation for all further academic development. Reading is one such academic skill. A famous adage in education circle says, “first you learn to read, then you read to learn”. Foundational academic skills are critical for your child to learn, regardless of whether they progress through a typical academic career, or the focus of their intervention shifts along the way to independent living (shopping, budgeting, taking care of their own hygiene needs, etc.)

School Readiness and Facilitation

School readiness support involves a focus on teaching your child the skills they will need to benefit from placement and be successful in a school environment. These include, but are not limited to, requesting skills, toileting independence, instruction-following skills, fine and gross motor skills, joint attention (paying attention to something someone else is showing you), and sustained attention (being able to pay attention for extended periods of time). Some of these skills are “make-or-break”, and others serve to further increase the likelihood of success. Facilitation involves sending a Behaviour Technician into the school environment with your child. At first, this mimics the one-on-one setting within a larger group setting, creating a microcosm of learning for your child. Over time, the Behaviour Technician transfers control of your child’s learning behaviour over to teachers and peers, so that your child learns from the school environment as optimally as any other child in the class. Behaviour Analysts are proud to say that they function to work themselves out of a job. Collaboration with your child’s teacher(s) is an integral part of this process.