di: How to teach snapping a snap

[Joe Kuhn]

​Susan, I loved Zig's book too.  ​You can't find that level of analysis
anywhere, at least I don't know of any. And it's the best because it
results in a change in student performance.  What a story!  What a rich
life!

In terms of tantrums, this student was probably 4 years old when I first
taught him.  He would often cry and whine during parts of our speech
lesson.  I kept his crying to a tolerable level with good pacing.  We'd
work hard, then play, work, play and keep it moving with few blank spots
for his tantrums to start up.  After a couple of weeks the crying was
beginning to increase so I asked his mother if we could observe him in his
University preschool classroom.  We watched from behind a one way glass
window an entire floor above his preschool area.  What we saw was amazing.

He was playing at a long raised box that had corn meal and toys for the
children to have fun with.  All of a sudden he started to cry and tap his
head (which he had done with me.  This made me stop teaching, I was so
taken aback during one our our lessons.)  He started to cry right after a
teacher had moved into his vicinity.  I noticed the connection immediately
and tried to predict when he would stop his tantrum.  When the teacher
moved away from him, he stopped, on my cue.  His mother was amazed I could
predict this.  I knew immediately what was needed in our next session.  I
needed to show him that I wasn't moving away when he cried or tapped his
head.  Instead I would move closer.

As Randy Sprick told us in his practicum on behavior issues, when you
threaten a rule a child has learned, he will often accelerate it to try to
get it to work again.  Our next session was ugly.  He cried and tapped his
head much of the time.  I got closer and worked as calmly as I could a mere
inches away from him.  You would think I was hurting him, but I wasn't
touching him at all.  Snot was flying and ... it was bad, but after about
20 minutes he started to slow down.  We did a couple of speech tasks I knew
he was able to do and after 10 seconds of no crying, we were done.

This was a goal I set midway through our work period.  I showed him what I
wanted on the clock.  He gave me 2 seconds, 4, 6 and then 10.  When he
finally did it, I shook his hand and told him, good job, you worked hard
today which was true. He sniffled all the way out of the room.  I'm sure
this was very difficult for his mother to watch.  It was very hard for me
to do.

The next day he didn't cry at all.  Let me say that again for emphasis.  He
did not cry or whine or tap his head one time.  We went back to work on
speech...  The real task would have been to extend this new learning
outside of our sessions with other people in his life who made him do
things that were hard for him to do.  Perhaps the University preschool
teacher would have been interested.  I don't know.  We didn't take it
there.  I don't know why.  I guess we were focused on speech.

We continued working on speech and integrated the grasping tasks mentioned
earlier.  After about 2 semesters of speech work, he had learned 12-13 new
sounds.  Some progress, but not much, particularly in terms of new words.
I learned so much from this student.  I still tell the stories so many
years later.

Thanks for your interest.

Joe



On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Susan Goodman <susangoodman at optonline.net>
wrote:

> I loved that book and enjoy your stories please send the other about
> tantrums
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Dec 22, 2017, at 1:16 PM, Joe Kuhn <joemkuhn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been reading "Teaching Needy Kids", by Zig and appreciate his candid
> stories, particularly those about teaching kids.  The insights are so
> valuable for those of us who teach either in school or at hoome.  So I
> thought I share a story of my own in case somebody else can use it.
>
> I worked with a kid during my college days who couldn't talk much.  To mix
> things up a little I asked his mother if there was anything else we could
> work on besides speech, which was really hard for this boy.  She said he
> couldn't snap his pants.  I had her bring in an extra pair of pants to our
> next session.
>
> Next time we met, we did a piece of paper tug of war.  I won the game and
> gave myself a point on the tally on the chalk board.  Next try he clamped
> onto that piece of paper like a vice and won easily.  He won a couple more
> times and I was sad because I was loosing the game.
>
> Then we substituted the extra pair of pants for the piece of paper.  I
> held onto the legs and he held onto the snap part with just his one hand.
> I had to help him get positioned correctly, said "go", he pulled and the
> snap snapped.  I pointed directly to the snap and said, "Good job, you
> snapped your pants.". I unsnapped them and gave them back and said, "Snap
> your pants."  He did it easily.  His mother was quite happy.
>
> Note we did a pretest where I had his mother unsnap his pants and asked
> him to snap them for us.  He put his hands around the snaps and bent over
> like he had seen other kid do at his preschool.  When he stoop up, his
> pants were still not snapped.
>
> I suppose someday snaps will work by putting your fingers on both sides of
> a pants fastener and they will hold, but not now with our current tech.  I
> realized in between sessions that he hadn't seen that pressure was being
> applied by the pointer finger and the thumb, so that is what I set out to
> teach him.  When you look at someone snapping a snap, you can't tell if
> pressure is being applied or not.  At least he couldn't.
>
> We extended the skill to putting on his socks because he couldn't do that
> either.  I held onto the toe and he pulled on both sides of the sock to win
> the tug of war.  Then we got his toes down by the opening of the sock and
> he pulled it right on.  I may have tugged on the toe a tad.  Do it again,
> done.  Good job.  Getting smart!
>
> We also went out to the car and got him opening the door lock of the car.
> This was back when door locks were a post by the corner of the window.
>
> I also have a story about getting rid of tantrums with this same student,
> if there's any interest.
>
> Teach well.
>
> Joe
>
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