Adaptive Skills Programs
Adaptive Skills Program Goals
It is the goal of Nurture and Nature to provide Adaptive Skills Services to our clients and their families by accessing the needs in the skill domain areas of Socialization, Communication, Personal Hygiene, Self Help, and Community Integration, Community Based Instruction and Participation.
Goals will be met by utilizing the principles of reinforcement, errorless learning and shaping. Interventions will occur in the most natural environment for the client.
Programs will be created for the individual encompassing cultural beliefs, safety plans, realistic expectations, empirical strategies and parent education.
Nurture and Nature recognizes the need for Adaptive Skills and looks to apply the best practice standards for client skill acquisition.
Parent participation is a requirement that will support teaching strategies and aid in faster skill acquisition and provide for lasting effectiveness and positive long-term outcomes.
Anticipated Consumer Outcomes
Nurture and Nature is committed to family education that will teach parents, guardians, grandparents, and/or siblings living at the same domicile to access behavioral support so they can be trained to increase their child’s skill acquisition with ABA services.
Quality assurance will be provided by using observable and measurable goals, all programs will be overseen by a qualified supervisor and a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Clinical meetings will occur quarterly to include parent participation and a review of progress. Services will utilize individualized teaching strategies to promote generalization to ensure long-term outcomes with care and compassion.
SOCIAL SKILLS / SOCIAL PLAY / PEERS
Nurture & Nature will work collaboratively, to teach consumers and families accessing social skills training and community inclusion with committed professionalism, expertise and ethics. We serve consumers with developmental disabilities and their families. e provide effective treatment to meet measurable and meaningful goals through several social skill training programs:
PEERS — Parent-Assisted Social Skills Training to Improve Friendships in Teens with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Ages 12-19
We provide effective social skills training through the empirical PEERS model (Laugeson, Frankel, Mogil & Dillion 2009) of social skills training to teach functional social skills within a twelve month 16 week time period using utilizing a direct model of two 2(2- hour sessions per week with peers and a peer coach (caregiver or parent)) in a group setting. per week and three hours of direct supervision a per month.
Our program begins with an evaluation and an assessment or re-assessment to determine the individual consumer’s and family’s needs. Our individualized program goals are based on utilizing integrating consumers with peers in the community and in aacross naturalistic natural settings to address social skills deficits through role-plays, perspective taking, and practice. The goal of Peers is to create lasting friendships.. Parents and caregivers will learn how to find sources of friends for the consumer and how to coach social skills through weekly homework assignments.
Domains and Programming Skill Acquisition Targets
Communication and Respondent Listener Skills
Initiating and offering appropriate greetings
Increasing eye contact with others when speaking
Increasing eye contact when others are talking
Perspective taking
Responding to on-topic conversational exchanges chosen by others
Creating a conversational segue (e.g. smoothly transitioning to different topics of conversation)
Initiating conversations and entering into a conversation
Maintaining conversations for increasing periods of time
Maintaining conversations with the opposite sex
Terminating conversations with friends
Empirical and powerful strategies for addressing bullying/rumors
Discriminating between comical vs. serious language
Discriminating between formal vs. informal language
Discriminating between figurative vs. literal language
Sharing jokes and the role of humor across daily activities
Interpreting the body language of others (e.g. open body language and social cues expressing interest vs. closed body language (e.g. crossed arms and/or crossed legs) and social cues expressing disinterest
Initiating and offering socially appropriate goodbyes
Socialization While Creating and Maintaining Friendships
Friendship is a choice, and how to choose friends
How not to be a conversation hog
What to do during a get together
How not to police the conversation
Discriminating and applying serious vs. comical language and situations in context
Discriminating and identifying emotions of others
Responding to the emotions of others
Dispute resolution and how to deal with hurt feelings
Accepting the perspectives of others
Sharing feelings and expressing empathy
Identifying social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
Responding to social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
Initiating individual social cues to others during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
Permitting others to speak in the absence of interrupting while presenting active listening skills
Tolerating the opinions of friends and agreeing to disagree with the opinions of friends
Sharing an opinion across contextually relevant situations
Initiating social questions with friends and peers
Discriminating people we know (e.g. friends) from people acquaintances from people we do not know (e.g. strangers) in context
Discriminating and responding to appropriate and/or inappropriate behaviors of strangers, acquaintances, peers, friends and family
Maintaining a social calendar, and how to initiate a get together
Extending and responding to social invitations
Calling friends, peers, elders and family by name
Initiating and responding to phone calls in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
Initiating and responding to text messages in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
Parent Participation and Social Coaching
Providing social opportunities in the home and community ( a requirement when entering the program)
Learning ABA methodology and principles of reinforcement
Participating in role plays as a priming technique, and side coaching during homework activities
Fostering social inclusion and lasting healthy friendships
Finding appropriate sources of friends and facilitating get togethers.
Social Play / Social Skills Training
Ages 5-12
We provide effective social skills training through community inclusion, play facilitation, pivotal response treatment and applied behavior analysis. Based on shaping and practice, role-plays, facilitated play dates, behavior rehearsal, peer modeling and reinforcement, Nurture & Nature’s programs are custom built to address the individual needs of our clients. per week and three hours of direct supervision a per month.
Our program begins with an evaluation and an assessment or re-assessment to determine the individual consumer’s and family’s needs.
Skill Acquisition Targets
Communication and Respondent Listener Skills
Initiating and offering appropriate greetings
Increasing eye contact with others when speaking
Increasing eye contact when others are talking
Increase eye contact when responding to directives
Responding to on topic conversational exchanges chosen by others
Creating a conversational segue (e.g. smoothly transitioning to different topics of conversation)
Initiating conversations
Maintaining conversations for increasing periods of time
Terminating conversations with friends
Addressing bullying and Functional Communication Training
Discriminating between comical vs. serious language
Discriminating between formal vs. informal language
Discriminating between figurative vs. literal language
Sharing jokes and the role of humor across daily activities
Sharing opinions with Functional Communication Training:: “I like/I don’t like because/ when/since…”
Interpreting the body language of others (e.g. open body language and social cues expressing interest vs. closed body language (e.g. crossed arms and/or crossed legs) and social cues expressing disinterest
Initiating and offering socially appropriate goodbyes
Socialization While Creating and Maintaining Friendships
Discriminating and applying serious vs. comical language and situations in context
Discriminating and identifying emotions of others
Responding to the emotions of others
Dispute resolution
Accepting the perspectives of others
Sharing feelings and expressing empathy
Identifying social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
Responding to social cues during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
Initiating individual social cues to others during ongoing conversations across contextually relevant situations
Permitting others to speak in the absence of interrupting while presenting active listening skills
Tolerating the opinions of friends and agreeing to disagree with the opinions of friends
Sharing an opinion across contextually relevant situations
Presenting enthusiasm when agreeing or disagreeing with the opinion of a friend
Terminating conversations and walking away from friends across contextually relevant situations
Initiating social questions with friends and others
Discriminating people we know (e.g. friends) from people acquaintances from people we do not know (e.g. strangers) in context
Discriminating and responding to appropriate and/or inappropriate behaviors of strangers, acquaintances, peers, friends and family
Maintaining a social calendar
Extending and responding to social invitations
Calling friends, peers, elders and family by name
Initiating and responding to phone calls in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
Initiating and responding to text messages in contextually relevant situations across friends, peers, parents and other persons of authority
Play Skills
Asking others to play and/or join an activity
Permitting others go first
Taking turns
Engaging in functional play sequences with others
Engaging in imaginary or symbolic pretend play sequences with others
Entering into pretend play
Maintaining reciprocal play for up to 20 minutes
Following the rules of a game
Playing a game someone else has chosen
Joining play in progress
Introducing oneself to peers
Try a novel game or activity
Tolerating losing a game
Developing peer relationships
Sustaining peer relationships
Joining and sustaining group activities
Learning unspoken, contextually relevant social rules by environment(s) and social situation(s)
Contributing and helping others while increasing community involvement
Addressing a social audience and maintaining affect to match the age, status and culturally relevant situations for the audience members
Addressing individualized social fears
Presenting appropriate behavior after accessing special events training (e.g. birthdays, groups, clubs, celebrations)
Presenting following skills with friends and leading skills with friends
Parent Training
Providing social opportunities in the home and community ( a requirement when entering the program)
Learning ABA methodology and principles of reinforcement
Participating in role plays as a priming technique
Fostering social inclusion
Facilitating play
Fulfilling data collection requirements
Anticipated Consumer Outcomes
Nurture & Nature is committed to family education that will teach parent(s), guardian(s), and/or sibling(s) living at the same domicile to access skill acquisition supports so consumers can achieve greater levels of independence. Working side by side with parents, families and consumers will be trained to increase the child’s social skills with the empirically validated principles of Applied Behavior Analysis, Pivotal Response Treatment and PEERS.
We target teaching behaviors through skill acquisition programming, task analysis, chaining, role-play, behavioral rehearsal, modeling and feedback.
Our programs create meaningful and measurable social skills goals with the aim to have a lasting impact on the lives of the clients and families we serve.