Social skills and play-doh

That is what we worked on today. When I got home from work, I sat down with Nick and Michael and we had snack time. All three of us sat at the table, and I had two types of crackers in the middle. We did a lot of hand-over-hand with Nicholas getting him to point to what cracker he wanted and prompted him to speak. After our snack time, I walked him to the kitchen and helped him to put his plate in the sink. We sang our "clean up" song while we did this. While he was eating snack we brushed up on our social skills and not stimming with the plate. With the play-doh he gets sensory input and we mushed it, and smushed it with our hands. We worked a little on imitation skills with him copying me as I mashed it with my hands and fingers. It is hard sometimes to keep him from stimming in these situations(twirling the roller,spinning the plastic cutters,gesturing with his hand in front of his face). That still pretty much dominates our sessions right now, we just re-direct him. He had a mini-meltdown when it came time to clean up. Lots of hand-over-hand direction,picking him up off the floor,intercepting attempted head banging, but with lots of patience, he came around and put things away. It is not like a normal kid when you tell them where stuff goes and they put it up, with Nick I have to physically take his hand and him over to where the item belongs and say "Put it IN". We have had good days so far. I have also learned that Nick finds it difficult to sit still through an entire meal(he is constantly moving,twisting,vocalizing) and I have had to break up his meal time. He eventually eats most of it, I just have to let him burn off some energy in the middle of it...otherwise it gets too frustrating for both of us.