Updates, after what felt like an eternity!

I've been whisked away to the other side of the world for work purposes, yet again, for the past five weeks and naturally have not been closely following Raiyan's ABA programme, which I feel so very guilty about. As guilty as I am about having neglected this blog for more than a month. So this post is indeed long overdue and yet again, here I am promising more frequent updates from now as hopefully I will be staying put for at least 2 months!

Of course, I'm not going to kid myself and write a long post about Raiyan's development for the last 5 weeks because apart from the mini notes courtesy of Jo, I really have no idea. I do know however from his ABA file the areas that Raiyan has been working on (some of them are actually those carried over from the last session I had sat on which I'm happy to see as at least I'm familiar with them). As I might have mentioned in a previous post, Raiyan's basic language is in place, so the focus now is to expand his descriptive language, his vocabulary and his imagination and in turn his understanding and general knowledge of things around him. His current programme consists of the following:

1. Comprehending and verbalising visual clues - We still have many copies of this activity to go through where we ask Raiyan various questions about a picture and make him explain his answer. Eg. if there is a picture of a girl picking flowers, we can ask Raiyan "Have the girls picked the flowers?" (which of course Raiyan would simply say "yes" to), then we ask "How do you know?" which hopefully Raiyan will answer "because the flowers are in her hands". It may be simple to you and me but this was very tricky for Raiyan in the beginning. Alhamdulillah, he has improved on this so much and he is applying this more in a natural scenario too;
2. Phonics - Using the Jolly Phonics book, Raiyan has managed to learn all the actions and exact sounds to make according to all the phonics. As we know, Raiyan was an early reader with him reading up to level 6 of the Peter and Jane books at 3 years old. But he did this through his extraordinary memory rather than knowing to the exact pronounication of the words or letters he sees. That is why when it came to writing independently, he would often ask us how to spell the words he hasn't managed to memorise yet and would not even attempt to spell it using the sounds the words make. So hopefully once he knows what letters and combination of letters make what sounds, he will be more confident to spell words independently;
3. Time - so far, he can tell time on the hour and on the half hour. Now we are working on 1/4 past the hour and 1/4 to the hour;
4. General knowledge - now he is learning what things are made of and this has extended to things around him and more than those that are listed in the activity sheets;
5. Story writing - we brainstorm short stories together and then eventually, Raiyan will write them down. After that, we can match the writings up with pictures and decorations and make it look like a proper book. Actually, Raiyan already did something like this over the Easter holidays but with a lot of support from Jo. I will try to post pictures of that book very soon!

Okay, that is all I can personally share for now. Tomorrow I'll get to see Kerri myself since Raiyan is having a social skills session at her place in the afternoon so hopefully I can get more detailed information straight from her on how Raiyan is doing! I will update again soon I promise!